161–170 of 330 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ZIP+4? I think that's literally enough digits to give every house in the US (about 150,000,000 apparently) its own identifier.
Only if there's never more than 10,000 addresses in a single zip code, which means that if you enforce that, you can force a zip code to appear by building enough house
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it should auto fill but not stop you from changing it, best experience 98% of the time. I just looked it up and apparently there's some cases of zip codes that do go across state lines too, but it's rare.
There is a canonical full address for every mailbox in the US. Would be curious to see what these houses show. My experience living in towns that received mail from other towns is your canonical address IS the other town.
Does this work for zips? Some zips have a leading 0.
US-centric. I typed a Mexico postal code (it’s five digits) and got routed to somewhere in Maine. So - yeah the whole “I can tell you’re in the US just by the zip code” premise is entirely flawed.
I have seen websites that more-or-less takes the author's advice though. They are country specific. They are backed by the postal system's database. They present a list of addresses that match up with the postal code. They do not work very well when a particular address does not have a postal code. And yes, that happens.
> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompeten…
This 1000 times. I’ve tried implementing what OP has mentioned, and quickly learned it isn’t possible. A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. So, to be safe, you have to enter city, state, and zip.
Sure but a zip code belongs to only one city and one state, right?
All that said, free-form entry is a hard sell. My _customers_ expect field data entry, so I implement field data entry. I just re-order my checks to be more forgiving until the data entry is complete.
I was implementing a customer service address entry using significance order 25 years ago. As I already _knew_ that I had a US-centric customer base (we sold long distance to sorority and fraternity members), entering US ZIP first saved a lot of time and more highly leveraged the US postal address cleaner that we had already purchased for our mass marketing mailers. The people working the call center _loved_ it, as they could focus more on their call turn-over than on data entry.
> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompeten…
This 1000 times. I’ve tried implementing what OP has mentioned, and quickly learned it isn’t possible. A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. So, to be safe, you have to enter city, state, and zip.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, the second sentence in the post is incorrect. > From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country. You can't infer the country from a postcode.
In the example, you might at least be able to cut down your menu choices to Maine or Mexico.
Even if they fixed that, there are other issues. (You pretty much need to cross-reference it with a database, which assumes said database even exists.)