User Guide

Section 4. Magnetic Card Data Parsing
117
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.