Address Formatting for International Mailing?

linuxbaby asks: "Anyone have any advice or wisdom from experience about address formatting for international shipping? I'm starting to doubt the process of asking individual questions of 'name, company, address, city, state, postalcode, country' because of complaints or misunderstandings from places like Ireland (no postalcodes), Germany (postalcode goes before city), Japan and England (many lines of address info needed). Maybe the best approach is to just get the country as a option-select list of 2-character country codes, but leave the other lines wide open ('address1', 'address2', 'address3', 'address4') for the person to fill in as they see fit. The point here is not data mining, but shipping packages as accurately as possible, anywhere in the world. Thoughts?"

Comments

thanks for asking

[Anonymous Coward]

you probably realise how many non-american users get pissed off when the compulsory field of state has to be filled in! I mean are americans that stupid? An what is it with zip code? My advice (I make web sites in belgium so lots of languages) is that don't call it zip code call it postal code (the french are happier with this). And don't make things like postal code only 5 characters long etc. Some country addresses require a box number too. The address 1 and address 2 is good but you are relying to much on the users filling it in correctly - imagine posting to England without a post-code. I guess the answer is there is no answer.

ciao