Custom Date for Birthdate entry

Question

I got issued a project that requires me to take a pre-exsisting professional Scholarship form and make it into a PDF. I've been able to make the form fields with no problem but I'm running into a few issues with the Date format.  This form requires the Applicant to type out their Birthdate and Social Security #, however, the higher ups don't like the default method Acrobat uses.
Problem #1: Because some of our Applicants are Elderly and/or are not very computer literate, I want there to be "some" flexibility to them typing out their birthdate.  IE, MDDYY, MMDDYY, MDDYYYY, MMDDYYYY will Validate through a script that turns it into the company standard format of MM/DD/YYYY.  I have a very basic bit of Custom Keystroke script that I found and edited slightly.  Its not pretty though.
var a = event.value;
if(a.length==5){var b = util.scand("mddyy",a);event.value = util.printd("mm/dd/yyyy",b)}
if(a.length==6){var b = util.scand("mmddyy",a);event.value = util.printd("mm/dd/yyyy",b)}
if(a.length==7){var b = util.scand("mddyyyy",a);event.value = util.printd("mm/dd/yyyy",b)}
if(a.length==8){var b = util.scand("mmddyyyy",a);event.value = util.printd("mm/dd/yyyy",b)};
This does what I want it to do, sort of, but deviating outside of this script results in undesired results. IE typing 02/13/71 will get 02/13/71 not 02/13/1971.  Then there's a potential problem of the century. Typing 021327 will get 02/13/2027 not 1927.
Can anyone lead me in the right direction of where to close the flexibilty off at giving an Audio Alert when any other keystroke besides 0-9 and / is entered while maintaning the Validity of the above format of MM/DD/YYYY?
(I realize this is pretty much nitpicking, but the higher ups say jump and I have to say How High and I'm not at the skill level yet to achieve the desired results.)
Problem #2: In the same form, the Applicants SSN needs to be entered but the default format under Properties > Format > Special is requiring the full 9 digits. However, we have more than a few people who have "less" than 9 digits.  Given that the higher ups want to give some flexibilty to Elderly and non-computer literate on the SSN field as well, I've been asked to correct this problem.  Now, I've been steered in the direction of Leading Zeros script and AutoTab features, but to be honest, most of this is beyond my understanding in how to achive it. I understand the concept of leading 0's in the util.printd feature of the 999-99-9999 format, however, any attempt to do this stuff leads in undesired results.  Please help if you can.
Thanks in Advance,
Dean

Answer 1

Thank you for replying Gkaiseril, not really sure what you're talking about with RegExp, hidden Fields and the like.  As I stated above, my skills with acrobat are limited and my knowledge of Java script is less than that.  Could you give examples or write out examples of what you're talking about?  I plan to learn more on Java, scripting and getting better at Acrobat, but for the mean time, I just need the scripting of how to get the Date field to do what I want it to do.
As for the SSN, I'm aware of the 9 digit limit, this is why I'm wanting the script to fill in less-than-9-digit SSN's with leading Zeros.  We have had examples of the past of our clients and applicants with Exm 001-34-5678 not entering their 0's first and it confuses them as why their paperwork was'nt accepted or returned invalid.  Plus, our OCR system doesn't like the SSN field if its entered incorrectly.  This is why I was directed to look at leading 0's and something about a decimal point ...
I haven't looked into the util.printd yet, in fact I know absolutely nothing about it except from what you told me.  No idea where to look for the things I want to accomplish.