Ubuntu Manpage: "Business::CreditCard" - Validate/generate credit card checksums/names

Provided by: libbusiness-creditcard-perl_0.32-1_all

NAME

       "Business::CreditCard" - Validate/generate credit card checksums/names

SYNOPSIS

           use Business::CreditCard;

           print validate("5276 4400 6542 1319");
           print cardtype("5276 4400 6542 1319");
           print generate_last_digit("5276 4400 6542 131");

       Business::CreditCard is available at a CPAN site near you.

DESCRIPTION

These subroutines tell you whether a credit card number is self-consistent -- whether the
last digit of the number is a valid checksum for the preceding digits.

The validate() subroutine returns 1 if the card number provided passes the checksum test,
and 0 otherwise.

The cardtype() subroutine returns a string containing the type of card. The list of
possible return values is more comprehensive than it used to be, but additions are still
most welcome.

Possible return values are:

VISA card
MasterCard
Discover card
American Express card
enRoute
JCB
BankCard
Switch
Solo
China Union Pay
Laser
Isracard
Unknown

"Not a credit card" is returned on obviously invalid data values.

Versions before 0.31 may also have returned "Diner's Club/Carte Blanche" (these cards are
now recognized as "Discover card").

As of 0.30, cardtype() will accept a partial card masked with "x", "X', ".", "*" or "_".
Only the first 2-6 digits and the length are significant; whitespace and dashes are
removed. To recognize just Visa, MasterCard and Amex, you only need the first two digits;
to recognize almost all cards except some Switch cards, you need the first four digits,
and to recognize all cards including the remaining Switch cards, you need the first six
digits.

The generate_last_digit() subroutine computes and returns the last digit of the card given
the preceding digits. With a 16-digit card, you provide the first 15 digits; the
subroutine returns the sixteenth.

This module does not tell you whether the number is on an actual card, only whether it
might conceivably be on a real card. To verify whether a card is real, or whether it's
been stolen, or to actually process charges, you need a Merchant account. See
Business::OnlinePayment.

These subroutines will also work if you provide the arguments as numbers instead of
strings, e.g. "validate(5276440065421319)".

PROCESSING AGREEMENTS

       Credit card issuers have recently been forming agreements to process cards on other
       networks, in which one type of card is processed as another card type.

       By default, Business::CreditCard returns the type the card should be treated as in the US
       and Canada.  You can change this to return the type the card should be treated as in a
       different country by setting $Business::CreditCard::Country to your two-letter country
       code.  This is probably what you want to determine if you accept the card, or which
       merchant agreement it is processed through.

       You can also set $Business::CreditCard::Country to a false value such as the empty string
       to return the "base" card type.  This is probably only useful for informational purposes
       when used along with the default type.

       Here are the currently known agreements:

       Most Diner's club is now identified as Discover.  (This supercedes the earlier
       identification of some Diner's club cards as MasterCard inside the US and Canada.)
       JCB cards in the 3528-3589 range are identified as Discover inside the US and Canada.
       China Union Pay cards are identified as Discover cards outside China.

NOTE ON INTENDED PURPOSE

       This module is for verifying real world credit cards.  It is NOT a pedantic implementation
       of the ISO 7812 standard, a general-purpose LUHN implementation, or intended for use with
       "creditcard-like account numbers".

AUTHOR

       Jon Orwant

       The Perl Journal and MIT Media Lab

       orwant@tpj.com

       Current maintainer is Ivan Kohler <ivan-business-creditcard@420.am>.  Please don't bother
       Jon with emails about this module.

       Lee Lawrence <LeeL@aspin.co.uk>, Neale Banks <neale@lowendale.com.au> and Max Becker
       <Max.Becker@firstgate.com> contributed support for additional card types.  Lee also
       contributed a working test.pl.  Alexandr Ciornii <alexchorny@gmail.com> contributed code
       cleanups.  Jason Terry <jterry@bluehost.com> contributed updates for Discover BIN ranges.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997 Jon Orwant Copyright (C) 2001-2006 Ivan Kohler Copyright (C)
       2007-2013 Freeside Internet Services, Inc.

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.8 or, at your option, any later version of
       Perl 5 you may have available.

BUGS

       (paraphrasing Neil Bowers) We export all functions by default.  It would be better to let
       the user decide which functions to import.  And validate() is a bit of a generic name.

       The question is, after almost 2 decades with this interface (inherited from the original
       author, who probably never expected it to live half this long), how to change things to
       behave in a more modern fashion without breaking existing code?  "use Business::CreditCard
       <some_minimum_version>" turns it off?  Explicitly ask to turn it off and list that in the
       SYNOPSIS?