Reply to post: Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

ovation1357

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

What about vintage cars pre-dating 1963?

Just corroborating my vague memory of seeing such cars with a Google image search, shows up at least:

LL 000

LL 0000

LLL 000

000 LLL

This apparently simple parsing task suddenly become a whole load more complex because of overlapping formats which no way to guarantee for example that ABC 123 is LLL 000 and isn't LLL 000L missing a character.

Add into the mix another commenters point about the 'cherished' plates like '007' as well as formats like my previous car of 'L0 LLL' and I think the best you could hope for based purely on the parsing of the registration they entered would be some fun passive-aggressive on-screen hints such as: "You appear to have entered a vintage registration number - are you really parking an Austin 7 or did you make a mistake?"

As other commenters have pointed out, RingGo hooks into DVLA and gets you to confirm your vehivle make,model and colour which is far harder to get wrong.

I certainly think that it should be mandatory for all council and private enforcement systems to perform a fuzzy match of the details entered to cope with such mistakes.

Can any of our antipodean friends on here tell us whether an equivalent database exists in Oz?

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