-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 11/17/07 18:51, Matt Brown wrote: > On 11/17/07, Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> This Perl module provides methods allowing United States' two-letter >>> state identification parsing from state code to state name and vice >>> versa. >> Is a package really needed for something this simple? > > It might be obvious to a US native, but it's hardly simple or obvious > to those of us outside America.
It's not the *need* for a lookup table, it's the need for such a small package. See below. > MI is a prime example, does it refer to Michigan, Missouri, > Mississippi or Minesota? The first two letters match all four. Don't forget the Marshall Islands! AL - Alaska or Alabama? AR - Arizona or Arkansas? CO - Colorado or Connecticut? MA - Maine, Marshall Islands, Maryland, Massachusetts? NE - Nebraska or Nevada? > If you come across this every day you probably know the answer, but I > just had to look it up again (Michigan) despite being caught out by > this just the other week! But it's just (or should be) a couple of 65-element (50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and various Pacific islands) hash tables wrapped around a couple of simple functions. http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/abbr_state.txt What would be much more useful (still simple, but with much more data) is a world-wide hash table of countries and states/provinces. And wouldn't you know it... there's already a CPAN module to do just that: Locale::SubCountry. http://search.cpan.org/~kimryan/Locale-SubCountry-1.38/lib/Locale/SubCountry.pm - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA %SYSTEM-F-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHP0R8S9HxQb37XmcRAiA2AJ9yhYepslZJCedRRxeLtverXuP2RQCggl/G jffLA1E9WM2wK00R4LZehYw= =UNmC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]