NHS number validator (JS)

A simple NHS number validator, following the process described in the NHS Data Dictionary.

Installation

NPM

npm install --save nhs-number-validator

Bower

bower install --save nhs-number-validator

Usage

Command line / terminal

To run the interactive validation tool, install the NPM module globally:

npm install -g nhs-number-validator

and nhs-number-validator will be added to your path:

$ nhs-number-validator
Enter NHS numbers to validate, Ctrl-D to exit
> 123
*INVALID
> 2983396339
 VALID

You can also install the tool for a single project, and just reference the executable in your project:

npm install nhs-number-validator
./node_modules/.bin/nhs-number-validator
# or
`npm bin`/nhs-number-validator

Node/Browserify

For environments supporting require/exports:

var validator = require('nhs-number-validator');

validator.validate('2983396339') // => true
validator.validate('test') // => false

Browsers

Any environment which exposes window will have the nhsNumberValidator variable attached when index.js is loaded, e.g.:

<script src="./bower_components/nhs-number-validator/index.js"></script>
<script>
  var validator = window.nhsNumberValidator
  validator.validate('2983396339') // => true
  validator.validate('test') // => false

  // or just use it directly if you prefer:
  window.nhsNumberValidator.validate('2983396339') // => true

  // you don't even need `window`:
  nhsNumberValidator.validate('2983396339') // => true
</script>

Contributing

Pull requests, issues, and questions are all welcome.

Some useful commands:

• npm test: run the test suite.
• npm run test-watch --silent: watch for changes and run the test suite each time.
• npm run lint --silent: run the code linter.
• npm run cli: run the validator CLI.

NPM is overly verbose at the moment, hence the additional --silent to suppress the unnecessary noise.

Creating a release

Making a release is pretty straightforward:

1. Update the version in package.json in the main branch.
2. Tag the commit with the same version number (e.g. git tag -l "1.1.1" && git push --tags), which will trigger GitHub Actions to publish to NPM.