PURPOSE: To provide an optical character reader where a character recognition rate is improved.

CONSTITUTION: The optical character reader is provided with a scanner 1, a character segment part 4, a recognition part 5, a key character storage part 6 and a character extraction part 7. The key character storage part 6 previously stores key character information and digit position information on a key character corresponding to the number of digits. The scanner 1 optically scans a whole slip 10 and detects a slip image. The character segment part 4 segments a character pattern from the slip image. The recognition part 5 executes a character recognition processing on a segmented character pattern and outputs the recognized result to a character extraction part 7. The character extraction part 7 fetches key character information from the key character storage part 6, searches the key character from the recognized result from the recognition part 5 and extracts the character of the number of the digits, which is designated as FC information, with the position of the digits of the key character which the key character storage part 6 stores as a reference.