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Introduction

I am a Citizen of the World, and my Nationality is Goodwill.

You can now read a blog post about how this package was created and its goals.

Socrates is a PHP Package that allows you to validate and retrieve personal data from National Identification Numbers. At the moment, most countries in Europe are supported, but the goal is to eventually support as many countries in the world as possible.

Some countries also encode personal information of the citizen, such as gender or the place of birth. This package allows you to extract that information in a consistent way.

For Laravel, a Facade and request Validator is also available (see below).

This package can be useful for many things, such as validating a user's ID for finance related applications or verifying a user's age without asking for it explicitly. However, we recommend you review your country's data protection laws before storing any information.

Ports of this package to other languages are currently in progress. Check further below for which ones are currently available.

Our goals:

• Standardize and centralise what is usually very difficult and sparse information to find.
• Have a consistent API for retrieving citizen information from an ID, if available.
• Test each individual country validation and data extraction algorithm with a number of valid and invalid IDs.
• Support as many countries as viably possible.

Installation

composer require reducktion/socrates

Usage

Socrates provides two methods: validateId and getCitizenDataFromId. Both receive the ID and the country code in ISO 3166-2 format as the first and second parameters respectively. Simply instantiate the class and call the method you wish:

use Reducktion\Socrates\Socrates;

$socrates = new Socrates();
$socrates->validateId('14349483 0 ZV3', 'PT');

For Laravel, a facade is also available for your convenience:

use Reducktion\Socrates\Laravel\Facades\Socrates;

Socrates::getCitizenDataFromId('550309-6447', 'SE');

You can also use the national_id:[COUNTRY CODE] request validation rule:

$request->validate([
    'id' => 'national_id:lv'
]);

Still in Laravel, the package will try to guess the country to be validated by the default locale:

App::setLocale('PT');

Socrates::validateId('11084129 8 ZX8');

However this is not recommended. The safest way is to always explicitly pass the country code as the second parameter.

validateId

This method will return true or false depending on the validity of the ID. In case the ID has the wrong character length, an InvalidLengthException will be thrown.

if ($socrates->validateId('719102091', 'NL')) {
    echo 'Valid ID.'
} else {
    echo 'Invalid ID.'
}

getCitizenDataFromId

This method will return an instance of Citizen. If the ID is invalid, an InvalidIdException will be thrown. If the country does not support data extraction, an UnsupportedOperationException will be thrown.

$citizen = $socrates->getCitizenDataFromId('3860123012', 'EE');

The Citizen class stores the extracted citizen data in a consistent format across all countries. It exposes the getGender(), getDateOfBirth(), getAge() and getPlaceOfBirth() methods. All will return a string (for the gender and place of birth), int(for age), a Carbon instance (for the date of birth) or null if the value is empty.

Using the example above, Estonia only encodes the date of birth and gender of the citizen in their ID. So the above methods will return:

echo $citizen->getGender(); // 'Male'
echo $citizen->getDateOfBirth(); // A Carbon instance with the date '1986-01-23'
echo $citizen->getAge(); // 34 (as of June 2020)
echo $citizen->getPlaceOfBirth(); // null

Supported and Unsupported Countries

Here you can see the full list of supported countries and whether they support data extraction.

Four european countries are currently unsupported: Austria 🇦🇹, Belarus 🇧🇾, Cyprus 🇨🇾 and Germany 🇩🇪. This is because we could not find a reliable source for the algorithm, if at all. Help would be appreciated to get these countries supported.

Testing

composer test

Ports

This package is also available for the following languages:

Rust

Contributing

Did you find a problem in any of the algorithms? Do you know how to implement a country which we have missed? Are there any improvements that you think should be made to the codebase? Any help is appreciated! Take a look at our contributing guidelines.

Code of Conduct

Our CoC is based on Ruby's. Check out our code of conduct.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.

Credits

Socrates was made with 💖 by Alexandre Olival and João Cruz. We are Reducktion. We hope to make someone's life easier after all the hard work compiling, researching, reverse-engineering and agonizing over ID validation algorithms - many of which were very obscure and hard to find.

Special thanks

A big thanks goes to these people who helped us either test with real life IDs or guide us in finding the algorithm for their countries:

• Alexandra from 🇷🇴
• Berilay from 🇹🇷
• Christian from 🇨🇭
• Domynikas from 🇱🇹
• Jeppe from 🇩🇰
• Jeremy from 🇫🇷
• Lisa from 🇬🇷
• Miguel from 🇪🇸

and Nair from 🇵🇹 for the package name.

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

SLourenco 🐛 📖 💻

Flávio Heleno 💻 📖

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!