Turkish Passport Number

Detects Turkish (Türkiye) ordinary ("umuma mahsus", bordo/burgundy) passport numbers. New-generation ordinary passports, issued by the General Directorate of Civil Registration and Citizenship (Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü, NVİ) since 2018, carry a nine-character document number consisting of the series letter "U" followed by eight digits (e.g. U12345678), printed in the top-right corner of the data page. Turkish sources report different series letters for the special/green (hususi, "S") and service/grey (hizmet, "Z") passports; those series are NOT covered by this pattern because their letter-plus-digit shape could not be independently corroborated. Ordinary bordo passports are by far the dominant variant.

Type: regex
Engine: boost_regex
Confidence: medium
Confidence justification: Medium confidence: the fixed "U" prefix plus exact eight-digit tail is structurally distinctive, but letter-plus-digits codes occur in invoices, SKUs and other identifiers. The issuing authority (NVİ) publishes no number-format specification and Turkish secondary sources conflict on the digit count (U+6, U+7 and U+8 are all claimed), so the U + 8-digit shape rests on real-world document instances and on consistency with the nine-character ICAO Doc 9303 document-number field rather than on a published standard. All tiers therefore require corroborating passport keywords, which is also why the evidence-gated 75 tier is the recommended workhorse.
Jurisdictions: tr
Regulations: KVKK (Law No. 6698 on Protection of Personal Data) (Turkey), Passport Law No. 5682 (Türkiye)
Frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 27701
Data categories: pii, government-id
Scope: narrow
Risk rating: 8
Platform compatibility: Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Compatible, Netskope: Compatible

Pattern

\bU[0-9]{8}\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

pasaport, passport, pasaport numarası, passport number, travel document, ID number, identification, ID card, license, permit, registration, certificate, data record, database record, record set, data extract, data export, database table, spreadsheet, data registry (+15 more)

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

U12345678 — Plain new-generation passport number, series letter U plus eight digits
Pasaport No: U08296543 — Turkish label followed by passport number
passport number U90130578 issued in Ankara — English label context with passport number
U14133624 — Real-format example cited in Turkish-language sources

Should not match

U1234567 — Only seven digits after the series letter — too short
U123456789 — Nine digits after the series letter — too long
u12345678 — Lowercase series letter — document number is case-fixed uppercase
A12345678 — Different leading letter (e.g. a foreign passport series), not the Turkish U series
S12345678 — Reported hususi (green) series letter S — deliberately out of scope; the S-series shape is not corroborated well enough to ship (documented scope limitation)
REF-U1234567890123 — U followed by a longer digit run — boundary guard prevents partial match
U00000000 — Repeated-digit placeholder — suppressed by AllDigitsSameFilter

Known false positives

Letter-plus-eight-digit codes in unrelated contexts (invoice numbers, product serials, container or tracking references beginning with U). Mitigation: Every tier requires corroborating passport keywords or label context within the proximity window; there is no bare value-only tier.
No checksum is published for the printed Turkish passport number, so structural validation cannot eliminate random matches. Mitigation: Rely on structure (fixed U prefix, exact length, word boundaries), AllDigitsSameFilter and label evidence; the high tier additionally requires label context plus keywords.
Sample or template passport numbers in documentation and application guides. Mitigation: The high and medium tiers apply the template-exclusion NOT-group to suppress sample content.