How the barcodes on South African driver's licences, smart ID cards and vehicle licence discs work, and how to get structured data out of them.
The PDF417 barcode on a South African driver's licence is binary and encrypted. What it holds, why a normal barcode reader returns gibberish, and how to get the fields out.
The barcode on the back of a South African smart ID card is plain pipe-delimited text with twelve fields. Which ones are known, which are not, and how to read it.
What a gate or reception system needs from a scan of the encrypted licence barcode, which South African documents can be read, and what to check before choosing a decoder.
Three ways to read the encrypted South African driver's licence barcode: a hosted API, an on-device SDK, or open-source code. What each costs and where each fits.