Ontario Driver’s Licence & ID Card PDF417 API

Capturing Ontario Card Data Without Guesswork

Businesses in Ontario handle Toronto-area fintech onboarding, cannabis retail, and car rental. Canadian AAMVA records use year-first dates, six-character postal codes, and the CAN country code, so a parser tuned only to US samples can store wrong values without any visible error.

Normalized Output for Ontario Cards

Ontario licences and photo ID cards are issued by ServiceOntario (Ontario Ministry of Transportation). When the back of a card carries an AAMVA-compliant PDF417 barcode, the StructOCR PDF417 API decodes it, normalizes dates to YYYY-MM-DD, reports the province in region, and returns document_kind. Barcode layouts differ by card generation; cards without an AAMVA barcode return a clear 422 error, and their printed front can be read with the Driver License OCR API.

Where This Workflow Fits

• Customer onboarding: Pre-fill name, date of birth, and address for Ontario customers and confirm before saving.
• Age-restricted sales: Read date of birth from licences and photo ID cards at liquor and cannabis counters.
• Licence-only checks: Use document_kind to require a driver’s licence for vehicle rental while accepting ID cards elsewhere.

Decode a Ontario Card Back

Upload a JPG, PNG, or WebP image of the full card back and check country_code, region, and document_kind in the response.

Prerequisite: A server-side StructOCR API key and a clear image of the complete card back

curl -X POST https://api.structocr.com/v1/driver-license-pdf417 \
  -H "x-api-key: $STRUCTOCR_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@ontario-card-back.jpg"

Illustrative Ontario Response

This response uses wholly fictional data. Available optional elements depend on what the issuer encodes.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "type": "drivers_license",
    "document_kind": "id_card",
    "source": "pdf417",
    "country_code": "CAN",
    "region": "ON",
    "document_number": "SAMPLE1234",
    "surname": "SAMPLE",
    "given_names": "ALEX MORGAN",
    "first_name": "ALEX",
    "middle_name": "MORGAN",
    "sex": "X",
    "date_of_birth": "1990-01-15",
    "date_of_issue": "2025-01-15",
    "date_of_expiry": "2030-01-15",
    "address": "100 EXAMPLE AVE",
    "city": "SAMPLE CITY",
    "postal_code": "A1A 1A1",
    "vehicle_class": null,
    "restrictions": null,
    "endorsements": null,
    "document_discriminator": "SAMPLE-DISCRIMINATOR",
    "issuer_identification_number": null,
    "aamva_version": 10,
    "jurisdiction_version": 0
  }
}