Address Formatting for International Mailing?

linuxbaby asks: "Anyone have any advice or wisdom from experience about address formatting for international shipping? I'm starting to doubt the process of asking individual questions of 'name, company, address, city, state, postalcode, country' because of complaints or misunderstandings from places like Ireland (no postalcodes), Germany (postalcode goes before city), Japan and England (many lines of address info needed). Maybe the best approach is to just get the country as a option-select list of 2-character country codes, but leave the other lines wide open ('address1', 'address2', 'address3', 'address4') for the person to fill in as they see fit. The point here is not data mining, but shipping packages as accurately as possible, anywhere in the world. Thoughts?"

Universal Postal Union

[200_success]

You can get the addressing standard [upu.int] and the worldwide database [upu.int] from the Universal Postal Union.

Addressing in England

[DjReagan]

Actually while it's customary to have many lines of address in England, all that is actually required is the house number, and the post-code. Everything else can be derived from those two. Having all the extra info just makes sure if you get the post-code wrong, it will still get to the destination.

Re:But zip is a "checksum" they should check!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can get someone's mail to the right zip code the post office doesn't really need the rest of the address, just the name. (Though it is much easier to deal with full addresses, so only try this when other options fail) This doesn't work so well if you name is common, but if you name is slightly obscure (which is most names, since obscure only means nobody else in town shares it) you are probably the only one in town with that name, and they can figure out where you live.

You've never lived in rural America, have you? With some variability based on population size, most American small towns have about a dozen *extremely* common surnames in addition to the more "obscure", as you put it, ones. Typically the common last names will be between 10 and 30 percent of the population, but I've seen some places where fewer about ten last names made up almost *half* the population. Combine that with number of juniors, IIIs, etc. that may be truncated or mangled in mailing information (my mother-in-law gets mail for "Mrs. Iv" all the time) and your advice starts risking a not-insignificant failure rate.

Re:But zip is a "checksum" they should check!

[DavidTC]

Yeah, each town has a people who lived here before this was a town, and possibly still own half the place. They also have families that are amazingly fertile, where greatgranddad had 5 kids and now the ones with that name number in a hundreds and half the damn town has someone with that last name as their second cousin. Sometimes these are even the same family.

OTOH, I know someone with a unique three letter first name, and he lives in a small town where everyone knows him. He has great fun telling people to addess mail to his first name and zip and leave off everything else. He's even gotten an international letter that was:

{three letter name} {zip code}
USA

I.e., using six letters and five numbers, he is uniquely identified in the world. ;)

Re:Travelocity certainly can't do it

[The Cydonian]

Which, again, is one of the pleasures of ex-pat life in Singapore. See, Singapore is a city, state, region and country all rolled into one, and every building here has a unique postal code, so as long as I get my postal code right, I know my address can handle any mutilation by any shipping company.

The downside, of course, is that postal codes, by extension, become traceable private information, so you'd have to start zealously guarding that as well.

Associative not relational databases

[jbolden]

Which you are discussion is very difficult to do using relational databases. The whole theory of associative databases is to allow data usually in a particular form but to allow for exceptions. Its an entirely different theory of datamodeling and needs to be introduced at the earliest stages of design.

That's a lot to ask for a small percentage of the market. It may not be the case for most business that, "'better to let them do this than to lose them as a customer" it might just be better to lose them as a customer in terms of profits.

OTOH for people who just need to have flexability associative rather than relational models give one most of the advantages of a rigid relational system with requiring rigidity.