RFC: postal codes => edid

[Daniel Haran]

Hi folks,

With Nicolas' help in scraping various sites, I'm almost done getting
the edid for each postal code in canada.

There's still some scripting involved to extract the data from the
downloaded pages, and some might have to be re-tried. Still, it's only
a matter of hours / a couple days until this data can be released.

So, 2 questions:

1 - Besides announcing it here, should I do anything to let people
know this data is now available? Media, politicians, NGOs?

2 - Mostly for those techies here: what's the best format for this? I
don't know what format StatsCan uses, or that's it's even a good idea
to copy it. How's a plain text, key/value postal_code=edid file?

d.

[Russell McOrmond-2]

Daniel Haran wrote:
> 2 - Mostly for those techies here: what's the best format for this? I
> don't know what format StatsCan uses, or that's it's even a good idea
> to copy it. How's a plain text, key/value postal_code=edid file?


   I missed this the first time.

   Don't bother with duplicating what they do as it wasts a lot of space
to do what they do with duplicating the English and French electoral
district with each column of the datafile (fixed size fields, space
padded, etc)

Best would be 2 CSV files, in some well defined character encoding
(district names have many accents):

a) 1 line per postal code

postal code,edid

b) 308 entries, one per (current) electoral district

edid, English district name, French district name

   This second file is not often updated, with the list and updates
being here:

http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=gen&document=ec92605&dir=bkg&lang=e&textonly=false


   The other thing they waste space on is per-province files, which is
just splitting the larger file based on the first two digits of the
electoral district.

--
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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