Clean data makes me smile.

No really! When I have a finite number of brain cycles to dedicate to some process that receives user data, it makes me quite the happy guy knowing that it has been pre-scrubbed for such nasties as newline characters, the occasional ☺, or worse, the dreaded ಠ_ಠ.

Brion sent in this function which is supposed to prevent users from entering unclean text into a "thank you note" text area on a professional recognition site.  Now, before bashing the function for it's curious name, I must say that it does indeed work at filtering out a bunch of characters that the original developer thought would cause an issue.

function numbersonly(myfield, e, dec)
{
  var key;
  var keychar;

  if (window.event)
    key = window.event.keyCode;
  else if (e)
    key = e.which;
  else
    return true;
  keychar = String.fromCharCode(key);

  // control keys
  if ((key==null) || (key==0) || (key==8) ||
      (key==9) || (key==13) || (key==27) )
    return true;

  // numbers
  else if ((("0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZa" +
             "bcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.,-/?!$ ").indexOf(keychar) > -1))
    return true;

  // decimal point jump
  else if (dec && (keychar == "."))
  {
    myfield.form.elements[dec].focus();
    return false;
  }
  else
    return false;
}

Thank goodness everybody always runs JavaScript.

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