> The serial numbers are used on a piece of equipment that we source from an external company and deploy to engineers. We don't have any control over serial number generation

It really is important to know, if the serial numbers stay stable like IDs and how many there are.

You can't seriously have 1e10 pieces of equipment°, so a lookup hash with correct numbers will help you filter out impossible matches.

> different people/departments have received, built, and added to, the various files using different formats of the serial numbers.

As I already said, it is very probable, that the effects of those people can be localized to certain files and time periods.

Creating a histogram for each file will help you determine which 13number format was used and for which timestamps.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

°) 1e11 even with the check digit.

In reply to Re^2: Merging multiple variations of a serial number by LanX
in thread Merging multiple variations of a serial number by Doozer

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.