Australia country code given away

[jufemaiz]

AU is the Australian country code - however it appears to be given to another country (unknown). Australian postcodes are four digits.

select * from zipcodes where Country = 'AU';

80593|96548|APO|AP|AU
80595|96550|APO|AP|AU
80598|96553|APO|AP|AU
80599|96554|DPO|AP|AU
80603|96577|APO|AP|AU

[jufemaiz]

Further to this, country codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

[daspecster]

Thanks! We like links and resources! I'm not really sure why AU is in there...it's a US database.

[jufemaiz]

Aaaaah, ok. That may need to be made a tad clearer on the site, particularly given you are including nation in the response.

I'll see if Ivan determine a source for Australian data. The idea is a great one!

[jufemaiz]

Dumb question - where's the original data source for the US information?

[ezkl]

@jufemaiz http://federalgovernmentzipcodes.us/, I believe.

As far as international data sources go, GeoNames is the best I've found.

[jufemaiz]

Further research reveals that the US military has US zip codes for non-US territorial bases. These have been included (rightly or wrongly) - the AP (and APO?) demarcate these in the Pacific.

[ezkl]

A good tool for verifying the veracity of US zip codes is via USPS's zip lookup. In quite a few cases where the current database returns multiple addresses, the USPS provides qualitative feedback:

The actual city in 16335 is... MEADVILLE PA While it's not correct, some mailers mistakenly use this ZIP Code™ for BLOOMING VALLEY PA KERRTOWN PA

The APO, FPO, and DPO abbreviations stand for Army Post Office, Fleet Post Office, Diplomatic Post Office and are legitimate.

[daspecster]

Nice! I'm working on ideas to handle more countries and special cases like you mentioned.

[jufemaiz]

Hi guys, added a pull notice to bring Australian postcodes into the mix.

[daspecster]

I think we got some in there now from this other data source. Let me know if they work!