Forum Moderators: phranque
I need a list of postal and zip codes of Canada Ireland. Austria Germany Saudi Arabia. some one plz help me
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 12:39 am (utc) on Aug. 3, 2004]
[edit reason] Deleted off topic comments [/edit]
Depending on what you are trying to do, you may not need a list of postal codes, or alternately you may need more than that.
To simply validate a postal code, most people just use a regular expression. Canadian postal codes are all of the format "LNL LNL" (L=letter, N=number, " "=space :) You'll find plenty of free scripts by searching for such things as "postal code regular expression validation", maybe with your programming language added as an argument. (note: I haven't published, nor am I associated with any of the sites those searches could bring up).
There's about three-quarter million postal codes in Canada and they change all the time as some get retired and new ones get added. So basically, most people never buy a list, and just verify the formatting.
To correlate (Canadian) postal codes and address data, I don't know of a single free source that is reliable. If all you want to verify is the province, the first letter of the postal code would do (or the first 3 for a couple of territories). The first digit indicates whether it is urban(1-9) or rural(0).
To get postal/zip codes with city/town info, longitude/latitude, other specialized data (population, time zone, daily savings time, etc...), or to make sure it is a currently valid one, you'll find a lot of people willing to provide it for you for a fee... as well as several big companies that provide that same information via web-services, though that's a bit more pricey.
HTH!
