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Address formats

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:48

Simon Jones tackles the tricky subject of handling addresses in applications, both within the UK and far beyond.

17 Rue St Jermaine

75216 PARIS CEDEX 06

Mail sent to that same address but not through the CEDEX system, might be addressed:

17 Rue St Jermaine

75006 PARIS

Since the CEDEX designator doesn't work without the correct postal code, or vice-versa - and the city is encoded as the first digits of the postal code - I feel quite justified in saying that the word CEDEX and any following sector number should really be part of the ZIP or postcode field and not the city or post town, which stops the post town field being polluted with crap, and means you can do efficient searches for "PostTown = 'Paris'", rather than inefficient ones like "PostTown LIKE 'PARIS%'".

Better still, you can group your results by PostTown and see all the results for "Paris" in one group, rather than seeing separate groups for "Paris", "Paris CEDEX", "Paris CEDEX 01" and so on.