ISO 3779 vehicle VIN decoder in PHP?

Question

Does anyone know of a ISO 3779 vehicle VIN decoder library in PHP, or Perl, or Python (or any other language, I can convert code easily) available as open source/freeware?

Even just something to decode the WMI portion (first 3 positions) would save me a lot of time. Thanks in advance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_identification_number

Insult

It seems like the WMI is actually a list maintained by ISO. You can figure out what country easily enough (using the wiki page) but to know the exact manufacturer without that list will be impossible. This site already has a VIN lookup but it's a CGI: analogx.com/cgi-bin/… – Elonore

Although it is not PHP, you might be interested in pypi.python.org/pypi/vin_decoder – Extractor

Answer 1

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a database of all the WMI numbers. Here is a link to the relevant web page : NHTSA WMI Data

They reference an ftp site that contains the data: WMI Data Source

You can download the 565.txt file or the mdb database which contains the data. This seems to be a very complete database.

Aleta

Answer 2

I'll let you scrape the data from Wikipedia, but below is a quick (modular) sample you can expand upon (finish off the WMI->Init() method). I would also probably make the VINLookup class a singleton or break off the WMI in to a database (normalize the data somewhere and treat it like a base-33 number like I have [possibly]).

// http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_identification_number#World_Manufacturer_Identifier

define('VIN_CHARACTERS', 'ABCDEFGHJKLMNPRSTUVWXYZ1234567890'); // no I, O or Q & 0 is last.

class WMI
{
  public $country;
  public $region;
  public $low;
  public $high;

  public function __construct($country,$region,$low,$high)
  {
    $this->country = $country;
    $this->region = $region;
    $this->low = $low;
    $this->high = $high;
  }

  private static function CodeToDec($code)
  {
    if (strlen($code) != 2)
      return false;

    return (strpos(VIN_CHARACTERS, $code{0}) * strlen(VIN_CHARACTERS)) + strpos(VIN_CHARACTERS, $code{1});
  }

  public function IsMatch($vin)
  {
    // first, grab the first 2 characters
    $code = substr($vin,0,2);

    // next, see if it's in range
    // we do this by converting it to a numeric
    $_low = WMI::CodeToDec($this->low);
    $_high = WMI::CodeToDec($this->high);
    $_code = WMI::CodeToDec($code);

    return (($_code >= $_low) && ($_code <= $_high));
  }

  public function __toString()
  {
    return sprintf("%s, %s (%s, %s)", $this->country, $this->region, $this->low, $this->high);
  }
}

class VINLookup
{
  private $vin;
  private $wmis = array();

  public function __construct($vin)
  {
    if (!VINLookup::IsValid($vin))
      throw new Exception('Invalid VIN specified');

    $this->vin = $vin;

    $this->Init();
  }

  private function Init()
  {
    $this->wmis = array(
      new WMI('South Africa',     'Africa',         'AA', 'AH'),
      new WMI('Ivory Coast',      'Africa',         'AJ', 'AN'),
      new WMI('(not assigned)',   'Africa',         'AP', 'A0'),
      new WMI('Angola',           'Africa',         'BA', 'BE'),
      new WMI('Kenya',            'Africa',         'BF', 'BK'),

      new WMI('United States',    'North America',  '1A', '10'),
      new WMI('Canada',           'North America',  '2A', '20'),
      new WMI('Mexico',           'North America',  '3A', '3W'),
      new WMI('Costa Rica',       'North America',  '3X', '37'),
    );
  }

  public function GetCountry()
  {
    foreach ($this->wmis as $wmi)
    {
      if ($wmi->IsMatch($this->vin))
        return $wmi;
    }
    return false;
  }

  public static function IsValid($vin)
  {
    return preg_match('/^[A-HJ-NPR-Z0-9]{17}$/',$vin);
  }
}

Usage:

// check for a valid VIN number supplied
VINLookup::IsValid(<vin>);


// create a new VINLookup with the specified VIN
$lookup = new VINLookup(<vin>);

// retrieve the _Country_ object (above), or FALSE if no country match was found.
$lookup->GetCountry();

Johathan