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Geocoding / postal codes for Australia and New Zealand  XML
Forum Index -> Postal Codes
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marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
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We are pleased to announce the availability of postal codes and postal codes based geocoding for Australia and New Zealand.

http://www.geonames.org/postal-codes/

http://www.geonames.org/export/free-geocoding.html

[WWW]
Anonymous



Hi Marc

I downloaded the database for Australia but it contained towns and suburbs with geocodes but no postal codes. Looking at some other comments this may be standard - but I would like to do is implement a postcode to map lookup, so I need the associated postcodes.

Are they available?

Many thanks

Shane McNally

webmaster at illuka.com

Anonymous



Hi is it possible to include the postcodes in the file for Australia?

Thanks

Ari (ari_b7@hotmail.com)
Anonymous



australia post supply a list of postcode & suburb info - so you can use it to link the suburb info to postcode
Carey Gister



Joined: 15/05/2007 02:02:33
Messages: 23
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Marc,

How accurate are the New Zealand postal codes? I received an email from a user claiming that their postal code (3010) was not recognized. I checked on the geonames site and it is not in the New Zealand list either.

I did some further digging, and it is not in the NZ.ZIP file in the postal dump.

I then went to the http://www.nzpost.co.nz/Cultures/en-NZ/OnlineTools/PostCodeFinder/

and looked up 3010. And it is a valid postal code in Rotorua!

How much faith do you have in your data source? And how can I go about adding new postal codes as I uncover them?

Carey
[Yahoo!]
marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
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Hi Carey

I did some digging too and it seems there have been massive changes in the NZ postal codes last year. Our data is therefore outdated and we have to completely recreate it from scratch.
There is a list of all NZ postal codes here :
http://www.nzpost.co.nz/Cultures/en-NZ/Personal/AddressingAndPostcodes/Postcodes/PostcodeDirectory.htm

Unfortunately I have not yet found a way to convert the pdf file into a parseble text format. gmail for instance only converts the first 44 pages out of over 500 pages.

Marc

[WWW]
Carey Gister



Joined: 15/05/2007 02:02:33
Messages: 23
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There are a number of converters that read PDF and write the data in a different format. I could not find any that were free, however.

If you are a user of this site and have access to such a program. would you be willing to do this for Marc?

I am not a Mac user, but I think the Mac might have this ability. I will ask around my office.

Carey
[Yahoo!]
Carey Gister



Joined: 15/05/2007 02:02:33
Messages: 23
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Marc,

What about this tool: http://www.pdf2exe.com/reader.html

It's free. Let me know if it works.

Carey
[Yahoo!]
marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
Offline

Hi Carey

There is also a simple txt export in the acrobat reader itself. The problem with this and with pdf2exe is that the tabular structure gets lost and it gets difficult to parse if you don't know were the place name ends and the street name begins. The best so far has been to copy it into the clipboard and paste it into open office, it is better than the txt export but not as good as the tabular structure in gmail for instance.
If we don't find an other tool I will see what I can do with the clipboard->openoffice export.

Cheers

Marc

[WWW]
KiwiGeek



Joined: 29/11/2007 16:55:55
Messages: 2
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G'day.

I have a list of New Zealand postal codes with their location (city/suburb), and also their lat/long (generated by me from public sources). Is there someone I can submit this to to have the database updated, and if so what is the prefered format?

Have a good one.
marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
Offline

Hi KiwiGeek

Great. Would be a fantastic contribution. Does your data set base on the newest postal codes?
You can send a file (csv, excel, ...) to my email address or you can attach it to the posting on the forum.

Thanks a lot.

Marc

[WWW]
KiwiGeek



Joined: 29/11/2007 16:55:55
Messages: 2
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G'day.

Yes, the data file I have represents the updated postal code set. Dataset should be attached to this post.

Unless I'm mistaken, there's no "cross-over" between the old postal codes and the new set (i.e. 2001, which was the code for Hamilton, is unused in the new set). I don't know whether that means you'll want to keep the old codes for legacy's sake, or clean it all out.

Also worth noting is the data was copied and pasted through Excel which did it's lovely thing of thinking it's smarter than all of western civilisation [put together] and removed the "0" from the start of the first ~230 postcodes (those in the 0000-0999) range. I stuck them (the zeros) back in with cell formatting, but of course that's not saved in a CSV (and doesn't seem to be saved too well in XLS, either) so I'll leave that to you guys to fix when it's being imported into your database.

Also, I don't know whether you have the location (names) usually saved with the postcode - for the NZ database file there's a lot of overlaps (0110 exists in a lot of different places). The location I used represents what NZ Post clasify as the Lat/Long of that location. I then generated the names for them using the closest "location" name to that position that I could find. I couldn't think of a better solution than that.

If you need any other information, just let me know.

See ya.
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marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
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Thanks, KiwiGeek
I have updated the GeoNames database and web services with your data.

Cheers

Marc

[WWW]
Jared



Joined: 10/01/2008 06:51:15
Messages: 1
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Hi all,

I would like to request the database of postcodes for Australia. The list will be used for the planning of the distribution of products in an Undergraduate theses. It would most helpful if in .CSV format.

jparkross at google mail dot com

Cheers,

Jared
 
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