Problem set 1: Credit
Problem to Solve
A credit (or debit) card, of course, is a plastic card with which you
can pay for goods and services. Printed on that card is a number
that’s also stored in a database somewhere, so that when your
card is used to buy something, the creditor knows whom to bill.
There are a lot of people with credit cards in this world, so those
numbers are pretty long: American Express uses 15-digit
numbers, MasterCard uses 16-digit numbers, and Visa uses 13-
and 16-digit numbers. And those are decimal numbers (0 through
9), not binary, which means, for instance, that American Express
could print as many as 10^15 = 1,000,000,000,000,000 unique
cards! (That’s, um, a quadrillion.)
Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because credit card
numbers actually have some structure to them. All American
Express numbers start with 34 or 37; most MasterCard numbers
start with 51, 52, 53, 54, or 55 (they also have some other
potential starting numbers which we won’t concern ourselves
with for this problem); and all Visa numbers start with 4. But
credit card numbers also have a “checksum” built into them, a
mathematical relationship between at least one number and
others. That checksum enables computers (or humans who like
math) to detect typos (e.g., transpositions), if not fraudulent
numbers, without having to query a database, which can be slow.
Of course, a dishonest mathematician could certainly craft a fake
number that nonetheless respects the mathematical constraint,
so a database lookup is still necessary for more rigorous checks.
In a le called credit.c in a folder called credit, implement a
program in C that checks the validity of a given credit card
number.
Luhn’s Algorithm
fi
Luhn’s Algorithm
So what’s the secret formula? Well, most cards use an algorithm
invented by Hans Peter Luhn of IBM. According to Luhn’s
algorithm, you can determine if a credit card number is
(syntactically) valid as follows:
1 Multiply every other digit by 2, starting with the number’s
second-to-last digit, and then add those products’ digits
together.
2 Add the sum to the sum of the digits that weren’t multiplied
by 2.
3 If the total’s last digit is 0 (or, put more formally, if the total
modulo 10 is congruent to 0), the number is valid!
That’s kind of confusing, so let’s try an example with David’s Visa:
4003600000000014.
1 For the sake of discussion, let’s rst underline every other
digit, starting with the number’s second-to-last digit:
4003600000000014
Okay, let’s multiply each of the underlined digits by 2:
1•2 + 0•2 + 0•2 + 0•2 + 0•2 + 6•2 + 0•2 + 4•2
That gives us:
2 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 12 + 0 + 8
Now let’s add those products’ digits (i.e., not the products
themselves) together:
2 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 8 = 13
2 Now let’s add that sum (13) to the sum of the digits that
weren’t multiplied by 2 (starting from the end):
13 + 4 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 3 + 0 = 20
3 Yup, the last digit in that sum (20) is a 0, so David’s card is
legit!
So, validating credit card numbers isn’t hard, but it does get a bit
tedious by hand. Let’s write a program.
Implementation Details
fi
Implementation Details
In the le called credit.c in the credit directory, write a program
that prompts the user for a credit card number and then reports
(via printf) whether it is a valid American Express, MasterCard, or
Visa card number, per the de nitions of each’s format herein. So
that we can automate some tests of your code, we ask that your
program’s last line of output
be AMEX\n or MASTERCARD\n or VISA\n or INVALID\n, nothing more,
nothing less. For simplicity, you may assume that the user’s input
will be entirely numeric (i.e., devoid of hyphens, as might be
printed on an actual card) and that it won’t have leading zeroes.
But do not assume that the user’s input will t in an int! Best to
use get_long from CS50’s library to get users’ input. (Why?)
Consider the below representative of how your own program
should behave when passed a valid credit card number (sans
hyphens).
$ ./credit
Number: 4003600000000014
VISA
Now, get_long itself will reject hyphens (and more) anyway:
$ ./credit
Number: 4003-6000-0000-0014
Number: foo
Number: 4003600000000014
VISA
But it’s up to you to catch inputs that are not credit card numbers
(e.g., a phone number), even if numeric:
$ ./credit
Number: 6176292929
INVALID
Test out your program with a whole bunch of inputs, both valid
and invalid. (We certainly will!) Here are a few card numbers that
PayPal recommends for testing.
fi
fi
fi
Test out your program with a whole bunch of inputs, both valid
and invalid. (We certainly will!) Here are a few card numbers that
PayPal recommends for testing.
If your program behaves incorrectly on some inputs (or doesn’t
compile at all), time to debug!
