{"id":141,"date":"2007-10-12T00:40:03","date_gmt":"2007-10-12T07:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/2007\/10\/12\/an-annoying-form-issue-easily-solved-with-a-regex\/"},"modified":"2007-10-12T00:44:27","modified_gmt":"2007-10-12T07:44:27","slug":"an-annoying-form-issue-easily-solved-with-a-regex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/2007\/10\/12\/an-annoying-form-issue-easily-solved-with-a-regex\/","title":{"rendered":"an annoying form issue, easily solved with a regex"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been booking flights lately. Orbitz has a “remind you” feature that lets you get a voice message, text message or page a few hours before your flight. So I started playing around with it and ran into this:
\n
\nOrbitz screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

A demand that I reformat my phone number to… what? You can then click on the “number and address format example” link to find out what they’re looking for. <\/p>\n

Uh. Ok. *click*<\/p>\n

And there, before my eyes: a series of about 12 different formats that could easily have been implemented as options in the form. <\/p>\n

Orbitz could have said: “So, you’ve got a Verizon form, well that’s great. Give me your phone number and I’ll reformat that into an email address without bothering you!”<\/p>\n

Instead, they chose to say, “Hey you – fix that damn phone number. I can’t understand what you’re trying to say with that. I’ll point out to you what you should have known – well, if you’re smart enough to click on the ‘here’s the proper way to do it’ link (not help, really).”<\/p>\n

All that crap could have been replaced with a regular expression. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been booking flights lately. Orbitz has a “remind you” feature that lets you get a voice message, text message or page a few hours before your flight. So I started playing around with it and ran into this:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complaints","category-ux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}