* James Laver <j...@jameslaver.com> [2009-10-11 19:25]: > There's an appalling lack of information out there on how to > multinationally handle addresses and postcodes.
Very simple: freeform multiline text entry. Period. Anything else is going to be broken for someone somewhere. If you need/want more structured data, then I'll bet that the purpose for is going to make sense only within regional/national boundaries anyway. So the way to deal is that you separately ask the user to also tell you their country (f.ex.) and then you use that as a key for how to break down the address into more structured bits, possibly refining your parse recursively, eg. by first doing a sloppy match for the zipcode and then looking up regional parsing rules based on that. Yes, it's complicated, but it's also the only way to do it right. Intersections between culture and computing are invariably complex and complicated. See also: writing systems; calendars and clocks; person names. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
