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Section 4. Magnetic Card Data Parsing
107
If the driver is successful in applying one of the rules, the name of the applied format is available
in the property applied_fmt.
LANGUAGE FORMAT
Format Name
(fmtx_name)
The format name specifies an identifier by which to identify the format template and/or rules
being applied. The maximum length of this property is 11 characters. The names can be
repeated on subsequent templates.
Format Template
(fmtx_template)
The format template provides a high-level structure to which the incoming data must conform in
order to apply the format’s rules. It is formed by concatenating characters and asterisks
contained in angle brackets (<>) or parenthesis. The format template string cannot exceed 63
characters. The following is an example:
%<*>?;59<*>?(!|#)<*>?
The above template specifies that if track 1 exists; the first two characters following the start
sentinel of track 2 are “59”; and the start sentinel character for track 3 is either ‘!’ or ‘#’ then the
rules for this template should be applied.
The <*> symbol specifies a don’t-care situation. All data up to the character following the <*>
in the template string is ignored when evaluating the data against the template. All other
characters in the template string must be matched with the data.
Format Rules
(fmtx_rules)
The format rules property specifies one or more rules that describe how the data is to be parsed.
It is a comma-separated string of rules where each rule has the following format:
{<rule>}
Because the ‘{‘ and ‘}’ characters are used to delimit each rule and specify optional tracks, these
characters cannot be specified as literals within the rule.