Thread: Best practice for international addresses

Best practice for international addresses

From
"Gary Hoffman"
Date:
Can anyone refer me to a source of advice for setting up an address
database that is general enough to handle postal addresses from any
country of the world? At our graduate school, we get mail from all over,
but particularly countries in the Pacific region. We have built several
address book type databases, mostly on the U.S. model, but extended with a
few fields. But we have never been able to format the output properly for
all countries. We always seem to be fiting the square pegs from various
countries into the round holes of whatever field schema we choose.

I'm not looking for a long discussion here, just a referral to a good
source of experience and advice.

Cheers,
Gary

**************************************************************************
* Gary B. Hoffman, Computing Services Manager  e-mail: ghoffman@ucsd.edu *
* Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) *
* University of California, San Diego (UCSD)       voice: (858) 534-1989 *
* 9500 Gilman Dr. MC 0519                            fax: (858) 534-3939 *
* La Jolla, CA 92093-0519 USA             web: http://www-irps.ucsd.edu/ *
**************************************************************************





Re: Best practice for international addresses

From
Frank Bax
Date:
I was looking at Cart software on the weekend and found that "The Exchange
Project" used an "address format" table:

# 1 - Default, 2 - USA, 3 - Spain, 4 - Singapore
1 $firstname $lastname$cr$streets$cr$city, $postcode$cr$statecomma$country
2 $firstname $lastname$cr$streets$cr$city, $state    $postcode$cr$country
3 $firstname $lastname$cr$streets$cr$city$cr$postcode - $statecomma$country
4 $firstname $lastname$cr$streets$cr$city ($postcode)$cr$country

The country table (and every table containing an address) had a field to
indicate which address format to use.

Frank

At 06:30 PM 12/11/01 -0800, Gary Hoffman wrote:
>Can anyone refer me to a source of advice for setting up an address
>database that is general enough to handle postal addresses from any
>country of the world? At our graduate school, we get mail from all over,
>but particularly countries in the Pacific region. We have built several
>address book type databases, mostly on the U.S. model, but extended with a
>few fields. But we have never been able to format the output properly for
>all countries. We always seem to be fiting the square pegs from various
>countries into the round holes of whatever field schema we choose.
>
>I'm not looking for a long discussion here, just a referral to a good
>source of experience and advice.
>
>Cheers,
>Gary
>
>**************************************************************************
>* Gary B. Hoffman, Computing Services Manager  e-mail: ghoffman@ucsd.edu *
>* Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) *
>* University of California, San Diego (UCSD)       voice: (858) 534-1989 *
>* 9500 Gilman Dr. MC 0519                            fax: (858) 534-3939 *
>* La Jolla, CA 92093-0519 USA             web: http://www-irps.ucsd.edu/ *
>**************************************************************************
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