[weaksauce]

really though, it's not that hard to write a simple regex or few line replace command to make the form dead simple to use. creditCardString.replace(" ", "").replace("-","").replace(etc...)

or, if you can use a regex in a sane language replace("[^0-9]", "") then check for the length of the credit cards that you are using. shouldn't take a dev more than 5 min to code and test. Your argument is not really all that valid.

[nucleardog]

That's exactly what I do whenever I expect a number like this. For instance, phone numbers... Normalize them by replacing all non-numeric characters /then/ validate them. I can't imagine trying to validate the hundred different formatting variations for phone numbers.