This was a 5-6-2004 note from Penny ...

Sander mentioned that you may need to update the search filter to support the
new German Patent Number format.  The following is an example of a new
DE Patent Number and the algorithm for going from an internal DE Patn to a user
Display/Search DE Patn format.

The German Patent Office is issuing Patent Numbers in a new format as of
January 1st, 2004.  We have just received last week the first patents with this
new number format.  This new number format is lengthy and required us to abbreviate
the number internally in the database.  However, we do not want to expose this
abbreviation to our users and we want to display the full Patent Number for the
user and enable the user to search by the full Patent Number.  This approach is
similar to what we currently do for US A1 and JP A2 Patent Numbers.  An example
below is the Patent Number DE202004000008U1.  We abbreviate this Patent Number
internally to DEK4000008U1.

MAIN.PATN:     DEK4000008U1     (This is the internal format that we do NOT want
                                 the users to see).
MAIN.PATNLONG: DE202004000008U1 (This is the "display format".  We want users
                                 to see and use this format instead.)

The algorithm for going from a PATN to a PATNLONG is...
1. Replace the 3rd alpha character in the PATN with it's "IP Right" equivalent
according to the following table...

Alpha   IP Right
-----   --------
A          10
B          11
C          12
K          20
L          21
M          22
U          50
X          60

2. Insert a "200" before the 4th character in the PATN.  This 4th character
represents the last digit of a 4 digit year.

There are currently a few hundred of these new format DE Patent Numbers in
the database that you could access for testing.