NSF Standard Pirate Number

The NSF Standard Pirate Number is a 11- or 14- digit number used to identify many cartoon, book, game or anime characters that are pirates and are assigned by the NSF Society.

History:
The NSF Standard Pirate Number was based on Delham's Pirate Numbering introduced in 1997 by Delham1104. The Delham's Pirate Numbering consisted of 3 components: a 3-digit block, a 6-digit block and a 1-digit block. The 3-digit block indicates the country of origin using ISO 3166 numeric code, the 6-digit block is unique to every pirate character, and the 1-digit block is an error detection number (or a check digit). For example, Captain Hook is ' Delham № 840 310418 6 ' - where 840 is a 3-digit country of origin (USA), 310418 is a 6-digit unique identifier and 6 is a 1-digit error detection number. This can be converted to NSF Standard Pirate Number by prefixing by 0 as '0-840-310418-6 ' - there is no need to re-calculate checksum. For a prefix, '0' indicates existing Delham's Pirate Numbering codes, '1', '3' or '5' indicates a pirate boy and '2', '4' or '6' indicates a pirate girl.

The NSF Standard Pirate Number was introduced in 1999 as an 11-digit. In 2005, a new 14-digit format has been introduced, this time the NSF prefixes for pirate characters range from 972 to 977. The 14 digit version uses Luhn algorithm to validate. For example, ' 0-840-310418-6 ' is converted to '972-0-840-310418-8 '.