Did you know that a postal code is just a simple set of characters? This article explains in detail what it is, why it is needed and how it works. After reading the material below, you will dive deep enough into the topic to understand the issues that interest you. You are probably familiar with this term, you just have not yet understood what it is about. From English, postal code translates as "postal code".
General information
A postal code is known to be a sequence of numbers and letters, sometimes with spaces or punctuation, included in a postal address to sort mail. In February 2005, 117 of the 190 countries that make up the Universal Postal Union had postcode systems.
Although postal codes are usually assigned to geographic areas, special codes are sometimes assigned to individual addresses or institutions that receive a large volume of mail, such as government agencies and large commercial companies. One example is the French CEDEX system. It can be seen that postal code is not a clever term at all, but an ordinary understandable technology.
History
Development of postal codesreflects the increasing complexity of delivery as the population grows. The codes began with post office numbers in major cities. London was divided into 10 boroughs in 1857 and Liverpool in 1864. By the First World War, such zones existed in various large cities of Europe.
By 1930, the idea of extending counties outside of major cities had even taken over small towns and rural areas. They evolved into postal codes, as we call them today. It is generally accepted that the postal code is the legacy of the USRS, where they were presented in their modern form in December 1932.
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The following characters are used in postal codes:
- Arabic numerals from 0 to 9.
- Letters of the basic Latin alphabet.
- Spaces and hyphens.
Postcodes in the Netherlands did not originally use the letters F, I, O, Q, U and Y for technical reasons. But since almost all existing combinations are now used, these letters have been allowed for new addresses since 2005. Combinations SS, SD and SA are not used for historical reasons.
Canada does not include the characters D, F, I, O, Q, or U because the OCR equipment used in automated sorting can easily confuse them with other letters and numbers. The letters W and Z are not used as the first letter. Canadian postal codes use alternate characters (with a space after the third character) in this format: A9A 9A9.
In Ireland, the Eircode system only uses the following letters:A, C, D, E, F, H, K, N, P, R, T, V, W, X, Y. This serves two purposes: to avoid OCR confusion and to avoid accidental doubling.
