KtoBLZCheck is a library to check account numbers and bank codes of German banks. Naming explanation: This library provides a check for "kto" (German abbreviation for account number) and "blz" (German abbreviation for bank identification code, A.B.A. code or similar). Introduction ------------ Both a library for other programs as well as a short command-line tool is available. It is possible to check pairs of account numbers and bank codes (BLZ) of German banks, and to map bank codes (BLZ) to the clear-text name and location of the bank. Python bindings are provided as well (--enable-python; requires the python module "ctypes"). For compile instructions concerning MS Windows, please see the file README.WIN32. On the download page a self-installing setup file for Windows compiled with MinGW/gcc3.2 can be found. Compile & Install ----------------- How to compile: If you got this package from CVS, then type "./autogen.sh" to create the necessary build tools. Then: Type ./configure to calculate some system dependencies. See "./configure --help" for possible options. Usually you might want to write something like "./configure --prefix=/your/prefix --with-bankdata-path=/your/favorite/directory", which installs KtoBLZCheck under the given prefix and its bank data file at the specified path. The default bank data path is $prefix/share/ktoblzcheck where the default for $prefix is /usr/local. Now type make make install and you're done. Running ------- And then give it a try: "ktoblzcheck <your-bank-id> <your-account-id>" Some example BLZ;Account-ids are the following from Bundesbank: 64192220;12345008 20210200;0240334000 56061472;0000191919 The ktoblzcheck command has several optional arguments; use "--help" to see a summary. The argument --outformat by default is "multiline". The other choice, "--outformat=oneline", gives you one line of result with the following tab-delimited fields: "bank name, bank city, result of check, BLZ, accountId, name of the checking algorithm" Bank List Format ---------------- A file with all bank codes (BLZ Datei) can regularly be retrieved from the Deutsche Bundesbank at bundesbank.de, more specifically from http://www.bundesbank.de/zahlungsverkehr/zahlungsverkehr_bankleitzahlen_download.php Since version 1.3, ktoblzcheck includes a script for automated updating of the BLZ script in /usr/share/ktoblzcheck/online_update.pl . Simply run this script with no arguments. It will first download the information HTML page by bundesbank and parse this page for BLZ updates. Then, the user will be asked whether one particular available file should be downloaded. If the user agrees, the file is downloaded, copied into the correct BANKDATA_PATH, and converted into ktoblzcheck's format. The bankdata.txt file used by ktoblzcheck contains less information than the file provided by the Bundesbank. Namely, it contains only four tab-delimited columns and only those lines that refer to the main institutes instead of all branches. The provided sed script src/bankdata/bundesbank.sed (provided by Daniel Gloeckner <daniel-gl@gmx.net>) will automatically convert the Bundesbank's ascii file into the required ktoblzcheck format. If you got the Bundesbank BLZ file in excel format, the four columns for bankdata.txt are A, O, G, J, in that order, and it has only those lines which have a '1' in column B. Authors ------- The original author was Fabian Kaiser <fabian@openhbci.de>. The current maintainer is Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de>. For contacting the authors, please write to the mailing list <openhbci-general@sourceforge.net>. This list is subscriber-only which means you need to subscribe if you want to post to the list. Subscription information can be found on http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openhbci-general Related projects ---------------- A ruby interface to ktoblzcheck: http://www.vdp-software.com/Rbktoblzcheck/ A different implementation of this checking algorithms: http://www.informatik.fh-mannheim.de/konto_check/ PS: Benchmark Notes ------------------- Some benchmark notes: Each time tried 10000 BLZs with random first 2 digits so that 66% of the banks are found, see src/bin/benchmark.cc. All results in seconds on my 1.3 GHz Duron, compiled with no optimization. Time check simply by calling "time ./benchmark 10000". With list<Record*> and manual finding with for(...) loop: 5.3s With list<Record*> and find_if() from <algorithm>: 4.2s With vector<Record*> and find_if(): 1.6s (the above at a later test: 3.5s) With hash_map<...> and hash_map::find: 0.2s (!!) Gee. This is kind of obvious :-) Actually, some time later I tested 100000 BLZs between std::map<> and __gnu_cxx::hash_map. Results: __gnu_cxx::hash_hash<...>: 0.89s std::map<...>: 0.91s Well, it seems that stdc++'s implementation of std::map probably uses a hash map internally. That, and together with the thought that a header file dependency on a configuration variable is probably a bad idea, lead to the decision to throw out <ext/hash_map> completely and only use std::map<>.
