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hetu - Structural Handling of Finnish Personal Identity Numbers

Introduction

hetu is an R package for structural handling of identification codes used in Finland, most importantly Finnish flavour of national identification numbers, the Finnish personal identity codes (in Finnish: henkilötunnus (hetu), in Swedish: personbeteckning). Some functions can also be used with Finnish Business ID numbers (in Finnish: yritys- ja yhteisötunnus (y-tunnus), in Swedish: företags- och organisationsnummer (FO-nummer)) and Finnish Unique Identification Numbers (FINUID, in Finnish: sähköinen asiointitunnus (SATU), in Swedish: elektronisk kommunikationskod).

The syntax in this package aims to be, when convenient, similar with another package specializing in national identification numbers: the sweidnumbr R package for working with Swedish personal identity numbers and corporation identity numbers.

Installation

Install stable version from CRAN:

Alternatively, use devtools package to install the latest development version from GitHub:

devtools::install_github("rOpenGov/hetu")

Development version can be also installed using the r-universe:

# Enable this universe
options(repos = c(
  ropengov = "https://ropengov.r-universe.dev",
  CRAN = "https://cloud.r-project.org"
))
install.packages("hetu")

Loading the package and accessing the tutorial

Loading the package in R command line:

A simple example of printing a table containing data from 2 imaginary personal identity codes:

example_hetu <- c("010101-0101", "111111-111C")
hetu(example_hetu)
#>          hetu    sex p.num ctrl.char       date day month year century
#> 1 010101-0101 Female   010         1 1901-01-01   1     1 1901       -
#> 2 111111-111C   Male   111         C 1911-11-11  11    11 1911       -
#>   valid.pin
#> 1      TRUE
#> 2      TRUE

The package can also be used to check the validity of Finnish Business IDs (Yritys- ja Yhteisötunnus, or Y-tunnus for short):

example_ytunnus <- c("5996039-9", "5619117-6", "6095515-9")
bid_ctrl(example_ytunnus)
#> [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE

A tutorial is included with the package and can be viewed with vignette-function:

vignette("hetu")

Contributing

Acknowledgements

Kindly cite this work as follows (citing the related paper strongly preferred but we encourage also citing software used in research):

> print(citation("hetu"), bibtex=TRUE)
To cite package ‘hetu’ in publications use:

  Kantanen P, Bülow E, Lahtinen A, Magnusson M, Paananen J, Lahti L
  (2025). "Validating and Extracting Information from National
  Identification Numbers in R: The Case of Finland and Sweden." _The R
  Journal_, *16*, 4-14. ISSN 2073-4859, doi:10.32614/RJ-2024-023
  <https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2024-023>.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Article{RJ-2024-023,
    title = {Validating and Extracting Information from National Identification Numbers in R: The Case of Finland and Sweden},
    author = {Pyry Kantanen and Erik B{\"u}low and Aleksi Lahtinen and M{\aa}ns Magnusson and Jussi Paananen and Leo Lahti},
    year = {2025},
    doi = {10.32614/RJ-2024-023},
    journal = {The R Journal},
    volume = {16},
    issue = {3},
    issn = {2073-4859},
    pages = {4-14},
  }

We strongly recommend citing the software used in research, as per
FORCE11 Software citation principles:

  Pyry Kantanen, Måns Magnusson, Jussi Paananen and Leo Lahti (2025).
  hetu: Structural Handling of Finnish Personal Identity Codes
  [Computer software]. R package version 1.2.0. DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.hetu

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Misc{,
    title = {hetu: Structural Handling of Finnish Personal Identity Codes},
    author = {Pyry Kantanen and M{\aa}ns Magnusson and Jussi Paananen and Leo Lahti},
    doi = {10.32614/CRAN.package.hetu},
    url = {https://github.com/rOpenGov/hetu},
    year = {2025},
    note = {R package version 1.2.0},
  }

We are grateful to all contributors! This project is part of rOpenGov.