Posted by
Russell McOrmond-2 on
Oct 15, 2008; 2:51pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/RFC-postal-codes-edid-tp1321p1346.html
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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