Howto: Create your own mask

Some day will come that you cannot create your mask with the default definitions or with some predefined aliases. So it's time to create it yourself.

Context

Issue 220 - The following struggle. I would like to allow decimals in a phone field. The format/mask is free to enter for the user, but i would only allow one '-' for instance: 06-12345678

How can i restrict the dashes to one?

Exploration

First thing to check. What is already available? Does there exist an alias? Does there exist a definition? What gets close?

a mask like $(selector).inputmask("9", { repeat: 10, greedy: false}); is close.

So we start with the definition of 9 and rename it to p (p ~ phonenumber)

 '9': {
       validator: "[0-9]",
       cardinality: 1
      }

 'p': {
       validator: "[0-9]",
       cardinality: 1
      }

We need to allow the definition to allow a '-' in the mask. So we adjust the regex to just do that.

 'p': {
       validator: "[0-9\\\-]",
       cardinality: 1
      }

Now using a mask like $(selector).inputmask("p", { repeat: 10, greedy: false}); allows for input of numbers including a minus.

But we only want 1 minus allowed.

##Crafting

Let's rewrite the definition as a function instead of a regex.

 'p': {
       validator: function (chrs, buffer, pos, strict, opts) {
                            return new RegExp("[0-9\\-]").test(chrs);
                  },
       cardinality: 1
 }