jQuery AlphaNumeric

by Paulo P. Marinas

Did you ever found a need where you want to prevent your user from entering certain characters?

Looking at the plugins available at jQuery, i found a great plugin by Sam Collet called Numeric.

But it was too limited, what if I'm asking the user to create a username? or to enter a number with decimals or an IP Address? There is another great plugin called Masked Input by Josh Bush, which can also control user input by defining a mask. but the problem was the length of text to be input must be defined as well. Again, what if I needed to control input of a username? I can't tell how many characters the user will be using, and I can't force him to use just 8 characters ,so I created AlphaNumeric.

jQuery AlphaNumeric is a javascript control plugin that allows you to limit what characters a user can enter on textboxes or textareas. Have fun.

You can download the plugin and these examples here

Examples

  1. Allow only alphanumeric characters + Toggle Code
    $('.sample1').alphanumeric();
  2. Allow only alphanumeric characters, and some exceptions like dot(.), comma (,) and space + Toggle Code
    $('.sample2').alphanumeric({allow:"., "});
  3. Allow only lowercase alpha characters + Toggle Code
    $('.sample3').alpha({nocaps:true});
  4. Allow only numeric characters + Toggle Code
    $('.sample4').numeric();
  5. Allow only numeric characters, and some exceptions like dot (.) + Toggle Code
    $('.sample5').numeric({allow:"."});
  6. Make a custom rule and define only certain characters to prevent, like dot (.), one (1), and a (a) + Toggle Code
    $('.sample6').alphanumeric({ichars:'.1a'});

API Functions

  1. alphanumeric - allow both alphabet and numeric characters
  2. alpha - allow only alphabet characters
  3. numeric - allow only numeric characters

API Properties

  1. allow - add excempted characters to the rule of prevention
  2. ichars - define a custome set of characters to prevent
  3. allcaps - allow only capital letters to be entered
  4. nocaps - allow only lowercase characters to be entered