| ||||||
| ||||||
|
How to validate India's Permanent Account Number using Regular Expressions
The Permanent Account Number (PAN) is India's equivalent of a National Identification Number. It is a 10 Symbol code that is issued to all taxpayers by the Indian Income Tax Department. It is a standard requirement for opening bank accounts, the instalment of a personal phone line, and receiving a salary. Naturally it's main purpose is to help prevent tax evasion. Now before we can write a regular expression to validate the Permanent Account Number, we need to have a closer look at its format. Here is an example: AAAAA1111A So, the first 5 characters have to be letters, followed by four numbers, and then another letter. The fourth character usually describes the cardholder: C = Company P = Person H = Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) F = Firm A = Association of Persons (AOP) T = AOP (Trust) B = Body of Individuals (BOI) L = Local Authority J = Artificial Juridical Person G = Goverment We will now move on to the regular expression that can be used to validate this above code. Note that we will not build in a check for the above cardholder descriptions, as a new one could join the list at any point in time, and render our regular expression obsolete. The format itself though should not change anytime soon: /^([a-zA-Z]){5}([0-9]){4}([a-zA-Z]){1}?$/ For a more extensive example of try the JavaScript valuator below: <html> <head> <title>Permanent Account Number Code Validation with JavaScript</title> <script language="JavaScript"> function pan_validate(pan) { var regpan = /^([a-zA-Z]){5}([0-9]){4}([a-zA-Z]){1}?$/; if(regpan.test(pan) == false) { document.getElementById("status").innerHTML = "Permanent Account Number is not yet valid."; } else { document.getElementById("status").innerHTML = "You have entered a valid Permanent Account Number !"; } } </script> <style type="text/css"> <!-- body { background:#CCCCFF; } div { width: 100%; text-align: center; margin-top:150px; } span { color: #000099; font: 8pt verdana; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; } input { color: #000000; background: #F8F8F8; border: 1px solid #353535; width:250px; font: 8pt verdana; font-weight:normal; text-decoration:none; margin-top:5px; } --> </style> </head> <body> <div> <span id="status">Please enter a valid Permanent Account Number.</span><br> <input type="text" name="pan" onkeyup="pan_validate(this.value);"> </div> </body> </html>
|
