[CivicAccess-discuss] RFC: postal codes => edid

[Russell McOrmond]

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.

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