What are literal characters? How to use SkipLiterals property in MaskedTextBox

Thanks Alan. That is very helpful :-)

Literals are characters which do not have a special meaning within the Mask property of the MaskedTextBox. In other words any character apart from 0, 9, #, L, C etc. which are used to denote a specific kind of character in the mask. Literal characters simply appear as themselves when the mask is displayed.

The SkipLiterals property allows you to specify whether or not the user is allowed to re-enter such literals. If it's set to 'false', then the user cannot re-enter the literal but must enter the next editable character. If it's set to 'true' (the default), then the user has a choice whether to re-enter the literal or not.

There's actually a good example in the online MSDN docs:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.maskedtextbox.skipliterals.aspx