Can Credit Card Numbers contain leading zeros? [closed]

Answer 1

Credit card numbers (like phone numbers and postal codes) are not numeric and should never be stored in a numeric datatype. They are inherently string data. Numbers that are not intended to be used in mathematical calculations (except autoassigned integers that are used as ids) are string data, they will be used as string data, they will be queried as string data.

Answer 2

According to Wikipedia, the first digit can indeed be 0:

The first digit of a credit card number is the Major Industry Identifier (MII), which represents the category of entity which issued the credit card. Different MII digits represent the following issuer categories:

• 0 – ISO/TC 68 and other future industry assignments
• etc.

So no, I don't think you'd want to use storage that omits leading zeros.

Answer 3

Only ISO/TC 68 credit cards start with leading zeros (see also the Wikipedia entry for ISO/IEC 7812). So it seems that they'd be very rare, but possibly existing