Here is a quick tip for restricting a number in Elm. I came across an interesting function in the standard library while building a form with some number inputs. I wanted to keep the numbers entered by the user restricted to a known range. Consider the following code:

-- UPDATE
update action model =
  case action of
    ModifyLevel level ->
      ({ model | level = restrictLevel level }, Effects.none)

-- VIEW
input
[
class "character-level"
, type' "number"
, value (toString character.level)
, on "input" targetValue (\level -> Signal.message context.actions (ModifyLevel (safeStrToLevel level)))
] []

In this example, whenever the user types a level into the character-level input, the program sends a message tagged with the ModifyLevel action and the level to the update function. The program restricts the level by calling restrictLevel on the data passed to the update function.

Here is my original, long-winded restrictLevel function:

restrictLevel : Int -> Int
restrictLevel level =
  if level < 1 then
    1
  else if level > 20 then
    20
  else
    level

This effectively prevents the user from typing in a number outside of the range 1 to 20. It turns out the Elm standard library has a function for this exact situation which can save you quite a bit of typing. The function is called clamp (read about it on the Elm docs)*. Here is my refactored restrictLevel function:

restrictLevel : Int -> Int
restrictLevel level =
  clamp 1 20 level

*Note that at the time of this writing, I was using Elm core v3.0.0