NHS Number command line interface (cli)

A National Health Service (NHS) Number is a unique number allocated in a shared numbering scheme to registered users of the three public health services in England, Wales, and the Isle of Man.

This tool is a command line interface that parses each standard input line into an NHS number, then validates the check digit is correct.

• If the line is a valid NHS number, then print it.

• If the line is an invalid NHS Number, or is unparseable, then print an error message.

• If the line is blank, then skip it.

References:

• National Health Service (NHS)

• NHS Number

Examples

Suppose you have a text file input.txt:

999 123 4560
999 123 4561

You can parse each line and validate it:

cat input.txt | nhs-number-cli

The output is one stdout line and one stderr line:

999 123 4560

Error invalid line 1. Error: validate check digit failed. NHS Number: 999 123 4561