Parsing OFAC SDN List

23 Jan 2008 by Chetan Shah.

OFAC maintains its SDN list in different formats

.ff
.txt
.csv.
.del
.pip

The data specs for all of the above are here

The xml format is much easier to parse. Data like :

Date of birth
Id type and number (For ex : passport #)
Place of Birth
Citizenship

which are buried in comments fields for .ff file have their own tags in xml format. This makes the extraction of these fields much easier and effective.

Also, AKAs and Addresses have their own embedded tags within the master SDN entity. This alleviates the whole ordeal of joining the alternate.ff and address.ff files with the master SDN.ff file to get the whole SDN file

The xsd is here

US Treasury has lots of technical details around the SDN list

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