South Africa Smart ID OCR with Node.js SDK

Working with the South African Smart ID card

The South African Smart ID card places the holder's identity number and biographical details in a country-specific layout. Re-keying those values is slow, while generic OCR still leaves a backend team to identify each text fragment and map it to a database field.

Structured Extraction for Node.js Backends

StructOCR accepts a Base64-encoded image or PDF and returns normalized national ID fields. For a readable South African Smart ID card, the response can include the identity number, name, dates, issuing information and address when those values appear on the submitted document.

Common Integration Scenarios

• Customer onboarding: Pre-fill visible identity fields from a South African Smart ID card before user confirmation.
• Account operations: Reduce manual transcription when staff enter identity data into an internal workflow.
• Document review: Store normalized API output alongside the original review decision in your own system.

South Africa National ID OCR with Node.js

The official Node.js SDK reads a supported local file and calls /v1/national-id. Open the TypeScript + Express tab for a server route using the same SDK method.

Prerequisite: `npm install structocr`; set the server-side `STRUCTOCR_API_KEY` environment variable.

Prefer another stack? Open the Python SDK + FastAPI integration.

const StructOCR = require("structocr");

const client = new StructOCR(process.env.STRUCTOCR_API_KEY);

async function main() {
  const result = await client.scanNationalId("id-card.jpg");

  if (result.success) {
    const data = result.data;
    console.log(data.document_number);
    console.log(data.given_names, data.surname);
  } else {
    console.error(result.error);
  }
}

main().catch(console.error);

JSON Response Example

This example shows the normalized response shape for a readable South African Smart ID card; unavailable fields can be null.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "type": "national_id",
    "country_code": "ZAF",
    "document_number": "9001015800081",
    "personal_number": "9001015800081",
    "card_series": null,
    "surname": "DOE",
    "given_names": "ALEX",
    "sex": null,
    "date_of_birth": "1990-01-01",
    "place_of_birth": null,
    "date_of_issue": null,
    "date_of_expiry": null,
    "issuing_authority": null,
    "address": null,
    "additional_fields": {}
  }
}