Re: Data manipulation

[Martin Rowe <martin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > > Does anyone have a slick way of extracting the postal code?
> > >
> > > The postal code could be US or Canadian.....

I did something similar around five years ago (so don't have the code
anymore) extracting UK postcodes from any one of three address lines to put
into a dedicated postcode field. The technique was to XLATE the line
converting all alphas to 'A' ans all numerics to '1', then scan the result
for known postcode patterns. As there are a finite number of patterns (I
think I identified seven from our database) is was fairly straightforward to
pick them out (eg AA1 1AA, AA11 1AA, A1A 1AA, A1 1AA, etc). This picked all
but a handful of codes (where two or more spaces were in the middle), even
those that butted up to part of the address without a space. I guess this
should work for Canadian (which ISTR are similar to UK ones) but I'm not sure
about US codes (five digits only?).

Regards, Martin
--
martin@dbg400.net / jamaro@firstlinux.net
http://www.dbg400.net  DBG/400 - DataBase Generation utilities
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