@PeterLudemann @david_chisnall @ashwin @Dav I started doing this in address forms that make the State/Province/Region field required:
@jernej__s @PeterLudemann @ashwin @Dav
Address boxes annoy me so much. In the UK, every postal address can be identified by two pieces of information:
The building name / number.
The postcode.
In any situation where this is not the case, the Royal Mail subdivides the postcode to make it true.
If you're building a system that accepts international addresses, you need to support a load of different things, but there are a bunch of forms I've filled in where they only accept UK addresses but make something like city or county mandatory.
@david_chisnall @jernej__s @ashwin @Dav
The Canadian postal code system (modelled on the UK system, enhanced to make typos difficult) can distinguish individual floors within a single building. The 9-digit US zip codes can probably do this also, but everybody uses the 5-digit version (the Canadian ones are all of the form V0R 2G0, with the only special encoding being that "0" in the 2nd position means it's a PO box).
[BTW, for a while I lived in Japan with an identical address for about a dozen houses; the only way to distinguish them was by the name of the addressee]
@PeterLudemann @jernej__s @ashwin @Dav
[BTW, for a while I lived in Japan with an identical address for about a dozen houses; the only way to distinguish them was by the name of the addressee]
France was like this until very recently. A load of roads had no name and neither did houses, so the only address information was village + name.
Over the last few years, they've been assigning names or numbers to every house and names to all of the tiny rural roads (with the controversy that you'd expect something like this to cause), so now every delivery address contains enough information to find it without knowing who lives where. I think their post codes just give you village-level granularity though, so you need that plus road plus house name / number to uniquely identify every postal address.