Skype toolbar meta tag… preventing Skype from messing up your UI

I’ve previously documented the method used to prevent IOS devices from formatting numbers.

Users on other platforms, notably Windows, have Skype installed and it too can cause some headaches with your UI as it inserts elements to decorate phone numbers.

For users that have the Skype Toolbar enabled, the following META tag will prevent it from doing a lot of damage!

<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE" />

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US ABA Bank Lookup data

Banks in the United States conform to a numbering system to allow for electronic transfer of funds between different banks. As all money is physically held and transferred by the Federal Reserve Banks, they maintain the system itself.

On paper checks, this number is visible on the bottom, along with the account number and check numbers in OCR format.

A file containing a list of current banks can be downloaded from:
http://www.fededirectory.frb.org/FedACHdir.txt

It is in a fixed-width positional format, with the following pattern:
http://www.fededirectory.frb.org/format_ACH.cfm

Knowledge of this system is useful in validating payment information entry.

JavaScript radix

The optional radix parameter for JavaScript parseInt(string,radix) function is often overlooked and can lead to some difficult problems when not specified. If you are in doubt, and only use/expect decimal numbers, you SHOULD set it to 10.

This might go undetected for a very long time, until someone decides to prefix their value with a zero or zero and an ‘x’ and your code interprets it with something completely different. This behavior can be different based on the browser used due to changes in the EcmaScript definition and support of ‘octal’.

Here’s why…

Radix can be any number from 2-36 to define the number system.

  • 2 = binary (0-1)
  • 8 = octal (0-7)
  • 10 = decimal (0-9)
  • 16 = hexadecimal (0-F, where… 0-9,A=10,B=11,C=12,D=13,E=14,F=15)

If the radix parameter is omitted, JavaScript assumes the following:

  • If the string begins with “0x” or “0X”, the radix is 16 (hexadecimal)
  • If the string begins with “0”, the radix is 8 (octal). This feature is deprecated
  • If the string begins with any other value, the radix is 10 (decimal)

In all cases, the following is observed:

  • Leading and trailing spaces are allowed,
  • If the first character cannot be converted to a number, parseInt() returns NaN.
  • Only the first number in the string is returned.

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