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On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 23:56:53 +0200, Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@xxx.xx> wrote: > Don't even get me started about places that do not understand non-US > phone numbers. Or addresses - a particularly vile subspecies of this > being forms that require entering a US state. That's why I am often > a 112 year old granny from Alaska with the phone number of 555-1234. Oh man. I get hives just thinking about this... but since we're sharing. I was on a data cleansing project about this time last year, using a popular piece of niche software designed to to intelligent data deduplication. This is something these guys had been doing for 15 years or so, internationally. And the headaches we ran into involving what is a State outsitde the US, and when it's required, and where to put County in places where the customer wanted to retain it, and trying to use a common set of db fields for this sort of thing and then running into places where State abbreviations had to be unique but collided with abbreviations used for counties, or 'states' in other countries, or provinces and any variation thereof..... Hives. HIVES I tell you. You'd think in 15 years they'd have worked out an intelligent plan for how to deal with That Sort Of Thing.There's stuff above here
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