« Those damn Penguins | Main | UUnet dial-up infrastructure changes »

.ZA ID Numbers

I rewrote my php class for South African Identity Number validation. Turns out that the information I received from Home Affairs was making me loose around two-three clients because I was not accepting their registration forms unless they faxed me a copy of their ID document seeing that they had failed the validation routine.

So I spent the past few days trying to figure out how the South African ID Numbers work. I ended up throwing out what I was told by home affairs, and in the old end I have something that seems to work with a huge wod of ID Numbers I have of clients.

So far so good :) I now need to clean up the php class a bit more and submit it into my PEAR code repository. I will be doing more testing of the class over the next few weeks and I am going to be releasing a version of the code once I've have tested it in production for the next few days.

I think I deserve another cup of coffee after all this hard work figuring out how to validate the stuff :)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck on March 30, 2003 11:28 PM |



Comments

Hi Jacques.
I am also struggling with finding publicly available information on validating SA ID numbers, and not being very successful. There seem to be lots of practitioners, but none reveal their "secrets". Can you provide any information or pointers? Thank you.
Wulf

Posted by: Wulf Eilers [TypeKey Profile Page] | September 13, 2004 3:42 PM

I see you are also a "similar boat" which I was in while searching for information on validating South African Identity Numbers. I started working on a couple of projects which required code for validation of South African Identity Numbers finding a contact in Home Affairs who was clued up in how they work the identity numbers, etc. I eventually gave up on talking to them.

What I did find out however via another source is that there are a couple of things to look out for.

The South African Identify Numbers start off with your birthdate in the following format YYMMDD then by number representing your gender whether you are male or female. For males this is a 5 and for females this is 0.

Posted by: Jacques [TypeKey Profile Page] | September 14, 2004 7:48 PM