ISO/IEC 7813

ISO/IEC 7813 is an international standard codified by the International Organization for Standardization and International Electrotechnical Commission that defines properties of financial transaction cards, such as ATM or credit cards.^[1]

Scope

The standard defines:

• physical characteristics, such as size, shape, location of magnetic stripe, etc.
• magnetic track data structures

Physical characteristics

ISO/IEC 7813 specifies the following physical characteristics of the card, mostly by reference to other standards:

Embossed characters 

by reference to ISO/IEC 7811

Embossing of expiration date 

the format (MM/YY or MM-YY)

Magnetic stripe 

by reference to ISO/IEC 7811

Integrated circuit with contacts 

by reference to ISO/IEC 7816-1

Integrated circuit without contacts 

by reference to ISO/IEC 10536-1, ISO/IEC 14443-1, and ISO/IEC 15693-1

Magnetic tracks

Track 1

The Track 1 structure is specified as:

• STX : Start sentinel "%"
• FC : Format code "B" (The format described here. Format "A" is reserved for proprietary use.)
• PAN : Primary Account Number, up to 19 digits
• FS : Separator "^"
• NM : Name, 2 to 26 characters (including separators, where appropriate, between surname, first name etc.)
• FS : Separator "^"
• ED : Expiration data, 4 digits or "^"
• SC : Service code, 3 digits or "^"
• DD : Discretionary data, balance of characters
• ETX : End sentinel "?"
• LRC : Longitudinal redundancy check, calculated according to ISO/IEC 7811-2

The maximum record length is 79 alphanumeric characters.

Examples

%B4815881002861896^YATES/EUGENE JOHN              ^37829821000123456789?

%B4815881002861896^YATES/EUGENE L                ^^^0000000      00998000000?

Track 2

The Track 2 structure is specified as:

• STX : Start sentinel ";"
• PAN : Primary Account Number, up to 19 digits, as defined in ISO/IEC 7812-1
• FS : Separator "="
• ED : Expiration date, YYMM or "=" if not present
• SC : Service code, 3 digits or "=" if not present
• DD : Discretionary data, balance of available digits
• ETX : End sentinel "?"
• LRC : Longitudinal redundancy check, calculated according to ISO/IEC 7811-2

The maximum record length is 40 numeric digits (e.g., 5095700000000).

Track 3

Track 3 is virtually unused by the major worldwide networks and often isn't even physically present on the card by virtue of a narrower magnetic stripe.

A notable exception to this is Germany, where Track 3 content was used nationally as the primary source of authorization and clearing information for debit card processing prior to the adoption of the "SECCOS" ICC standards. Track 3 is standardized nationally to contain both the cardholder's bank account number and branch sort code (BLZ).

Programming

Parsing Track 1 and Track 2 can be done with Regular Expressions. Included here is just the Regular Expression for parsing Track 1.

Track 1

^%([A-Z])([0-9]{1,19})\^([^\^]{2,26})\^([0-9]{4}|\^)([0-9]{3}|\^)([^\?]+)\?$

This Regex will capture all of the important fields into the following groups:

• Group 1: Format Code
• Group 2: Primary account number (PAN)
• Group 3: Name
• Group 4: Expiration Date
• Group 5: Service Code
• Group 6: Discretionary data

References

External links

Reference implementations

• Magnetic Track Parser, a Java library to parse magnetic track data
• Credit Card Track Data Parser, a Javscript library is for parsing credit card track data such as might be returned from a USB card reader
• magnet, a Ruby library for decoding the track data on magnetic stripe cards