IBM deserves an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for this!!! This problem has persistently plagued me for ages! I'm glad someone finally came up with a solution to this. My only recourse up to this point has been to avoid SSN fields on any web form. If my boss wants something that requires a unique personal identifier I tell him it can't be done--not unless he wants to hire a team of interns to parse whatever voodoo people put into that SSN field!
Thank you so much for this new knowledge IBM! Now if we can do something about phone number fields I'll be in web developer heaven!
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982