At 12:35 PM -0400 8/22/08, Dan Joseph wrote:
> tedd wrote:
>> Why take them out in the first place? Keep the zip code as a string. After
>> all, not all countries use just numbers.
From a recent experience, you should all listen to Tedd's advice. I
inhereited an application when I came to work at my current job where the
developer used an INT(11) mysql column type for zipcodes. Its turned things
into a nightmare. We pulll quotes based off distance and calculate that off
zip codes. First I found that there are some 4 digit zip codes in other
counties, and shipping from Ohio to New Jersey quotes were coming up as
thousands of miles and thousands of dollars, when they shouldn't have. Then
there was the announcement of expanding into Canada. Then came digging thru
all the code trying to redo how zip codes are happening, and ultimately its
lead to a rewrite of the system.
Do yourself a favor, and use a string type, fix the ones you have with a
sprintf() function and be glad you won't have to suffer in the future.
--
-Dan Joseph
Back-side I told the OP to convert to sting, add zeros to the left,
and left-trim as necessary.
There is much more here than what meets the eye with international addresses.
As a word of caution, don't make anything a number and also open
address forms to accept multiple strings for international
addressing. There's a big world out there of people who don't conform
to what we think is the "standard". Remember, if you speak/write
English then you're only 4 percent of the world's population. We're
hardly the "standard" for anything.
Cheers,
tedd
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