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Re: ITP: liblocale-us-perl -- Module for United States state identification



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On 11/17/07 18:51, Matt Brown wrote:
> On 11/17/07, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:
>>> This Perl module provides methods allowing United States' two-letter
>>> state identification parsing from state code to state name and vice
>>> versa.
>> Is a package really needed for something this simple?
> 
> It might be obvious to a US native, but it's hardly simple or obvious
> to those of us outside America.

It's not the *need* for a lookup table, it's the need for such a
small package.  See below.

> MI is a prime example, does it refer to Michigan, Missouri,
> Mississippi or Minesota? The first two letters match all four.

Don't forget the Marshall Islands!

AL - Alaska or Alabama?
AR - Arizona or Arkansas?
CO - Colorado or Connecticut?
MA - Maine, Marshall Islands, Maryland, Massachusetts?
NE - Nebraska or Nevada?

> If you come across this every day you probably know the answer, but I
> just had to look it up again (Michigan) despite being caught out by
> this just the other week!

But it's just (or should be) a couple of 65-element (50 states, DC,
Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and various Pacific islands) hash
tables wrapped around a couple of simple functions.

http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/abbr_state.txt

What would be much more useful (still simple, but with much more
data) is a world-wide hash table of countries and states/provinces.

And wouldn't you know it... there's already a CPAN module to do just
that: Locale::SubCountry.

http://search.cpan.org/~kimryan/Locale-SubCountry-1.38/lib/Locale/SubCountry.pm

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA  USA

%SYSTEM-F-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels
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