NHS Number command line interface

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 that contains one NNS Number per line, and some may be valid or invalid:

999 123 4560
999 123 4561

If you use Linux or macOS, then here's how to parse each line and validate it:

cat input.txt | nhs-number-cli

If you use Windows, then here's how to parse each line and validate it:

type input.txt | nhs-number-cli.exe

The commmand prints the valid NHS Number to stdout:

999 123 4560

The commmand prints the invalid NHS Number to stderr:

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

Releases

You can build a release for your own platform:

cargo build --release

You can download a prebuilt release for Windows:

• Windows with GNU: <target/x86_64-pc-windows-gnu/release/nhs-number-cli.exe>

We aim to add more prebuilt releases soon.