It might be more useful to have this discussion in a separate thread, not tagged on to a discussion about test data sets.
That being said, OLC is defined here: https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/docs/olc_definition.adoc *Codes with odd length <11:* Surprisingly, the definition doesn't contain any clear statement about codes with an even length <11 being considered invalid, although that seems to be the intention (and should probably be added to the definition). There might be some edge cases where codes of length 9 lead to a sensible location, like the examples near the poles you bring up - but in the general case, having an area with a 20:1 aspect ratio in degrees doesn't seem to be worth the small reduction in code length. *Additional '°' character:* I don't think that having an additional character is really useful. What are your reasons for suggesting it? *'+' character optional?:* If there is no '+' character, then the string should not be considered a valid OLC. One reason for this is exactly the ambiguity you bring up. There's a big difference between "85FQ0000+ Location" and "85FQ+ Location". Another reason is that strings missing a '+' character can't really be identified as plus codes by humans. -- Public site: http://www.openlocationcode.com/ Github project: https://github.com/google/open-location-code Demo site: http://plus.codes/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Plus Codes Community Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-location-code+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to open-location-code@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/open-location-code. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-location-code/00feae00-5c96-4a7a-b193-52908cd83dae%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.