NAME

Finance::PremiumBonds - Perl extension to check Premium Bond holder's numbers

SYNOPSIS

  use Finance::PremiumBonds;
  
  if (defined(my $won = Finance::PremiumBonds::has_won($holder_number))) 
  {
      print "Looks like you " . ($won)? 'may have won' : 'have not won';
  } else {
      warn "An error occurred.";
  }
  

DESCRIPTION

Quick way to look up a Premium Bond holder's number on the National Savings and Investments website to determine whether the holder has won any prizes recently.

Now uses the AJAX interface the NS&I site uses, which returns some JSON so we don't have to screen-scrape.

I've never won anything, so I don't know what the win response looks like (if you have, please do help me by letting me know!), so it treats the absence of the no_win status in the response as a win - this means it's possible that it could falsely report positive if there are other statuses, e.g. "failed to check" or similar.

FUNCTIONS

has_won($holder_number, $period)

Checks whether $holder_number has won any prizes in the specified period. Returns 1 if it looks like you've won, 0 if you haven't, or undef if it failed to check.

The period is any period recognised by the NS&I site - at the time of writing, that's this_month, last_six_month, unclaimed_prize. If it's not given, then this_month is used as a sensible default.

AUTHOR

David Precious, <davidp@preshweb.co.uk>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2008-2016 by David Precious

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.7 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.

LIMITATIONS

Currently, the module detects lack of a recognised "losing" response rather than the presence of a winning response; without a holder's number which has won something, I can't see what the winning responses look like. Maybe my meagre Premium Bonds investment will win something one day, then I can update this module :)