Placeholders

Used in the Edit mode, placeholders replace all missing characters by default characters. There are predefined masks for the date and time. The following symbols are the placeholders that you can use for alphanumeric formatting.

0	Placeholder for a mandatory digit.
#	Placeholder for an optional digit.
S	Placeholder for a mandatory digit or sign.
s	Placeholder for an optional digit or sign.
L	Placeholder for a mandatory letter.
l	Placeholder for an optional letter.
U	Placeholder for a mandatory uppercase letter.
u	Placeholder for an optional uppercase letter.
M	Placeholder for a mandatory lowercase letter.
m	Placeholder for an optional lowercase letter.
A	Placeholder for a mandatory digit or letter.
a	Placeholder for an optional digit or letter.
P	Placeholder for a mandatory digit or uppercase letter.
p	Placeholder for an optional digit or uppercase letter.
W	Placeholder for a mandatory digit or lowercase letter.
w	Placeholder for an optional digit or lowercase letter.
X	Placeholder for a mandatory digit or letter from a to f (or A to F)
x	Placeholder for an optional digit or letter from a to f (or A to F)
C	Placeholder for a mandatory any character.
c	Placeholder for an optional any character.
.	Placeholder for the decimal point.
,	Placeholder for the thousands separator.
E,e	Placeholder for the exponent separator.
[xy	Placeholder for a mandatory digit from x to y included.
{xxxx}	Placeholder for a mandatory character from a set of characters. The list of characters is placed between two braces { and }. If you put “a” in the list and if you enter “A”, there is an automatic conversion to “a”.
&xxxx&	Placeholder for an optional character from a set of characters. The list is placed between two “&”.
(@#	Placeholder for a mandatory letter from @ to # included. If, the case of @ and # is different so the case is ignored or else the case is active.
/	Placeholder for date separator.
:	Placeholder for time separator.
\	The next character included in the mask for display and value.
!	Formatting must proceed from right to left.

“all characters between” are only displayed (not present in the value).

If a format has an exponent, digits, and number separators with a decimal separator (and only one) then the format is a float format. The float format ignores placeholder <!>. The integer part reads from right to left while the decimal part reads from left to right. The other characters which are not between double-quotes, are displayed and included in the value.

Default Value

The default value is space for characters that are not mandatory characters.