Implementing react-input-mask for web apps
Blog post from LogRocket
Modern web applications utilize various user input methods, including keyboard events, which are crucial for capturing detailed user input data. To enhance usability and prevent input errors, input masks are used in web applications, such as those built with React, to provide constraints on user inputs like phone numbers, dates, and product codes. Input masks act as templates that restrict users to enter only valid characters according to a predefined format, thus ensuring clean and valid data is communicated to the backend. The popular react-input-mask library offers a robust API for implementing input masks in React applications, allowing developers to create flexible and user-friendly input fields with features like custom format characters and dynamic masking. Despite the library's discontinuation, active forks and alternatives like react-number-format and react-maskedinput are available, offering various features for input masking. The input masking concept is essential for maintaining data consistency and accuracy in web applications, and ongoing developments in libraries like react-input-mask continue to enhance its capabilities.