

Show HN: zipasaur.us, a simple postal code API - eignerchris_
http://zipasaur.us/

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misterhaywood
Give an example with multiple word city name. For example, would
<http://zipasaur.us/state/il/city/east+moline> or
<http://zipasaur.us/state/ca/city/los+angeles> work?

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eignerchris_
Good catch. I've fixed this and updated one of the examples. You should be
able to do just as you described:
<http://zipasaur.us/state/ca/city/los+angeles>

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afaqurk
Very awesome utility API. A bit targeted (US) but I will be integrating it
into 2 projects immediately.

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joeyespo
Hey Chris, this looks awesome!

I saw the donate button. Are you on Gittip? I'd be happy to set up a recurring
donation if I end up using this in some of my projects.

<https://www.gittip.com/>

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eignerchris_
hey thanks everyone for the feedback. GeoNames includes postal code data for
many countries. I'll see if I can add more countries in the next week or so!

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draz
Related: can you expand it to include the reverse (geolocation to zip code)?
Anyone know of a restful service that might do that, alternatively?

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lutusp
That would be very difficult, and couldn't be made deterministic with a
typical ZIP code database. The reason is most ZIP code databases list a
geological position representing a location within the zone, but not its
perimeter or geological extent. Therefore, converting from a geological
position to a ZIP code would be a guessing game.

Here's a typical ZIP code database entry:

"74857","Newalla","OK","35.351612","-97.19507","-6","1"

The fields are ZIP code, place name, state, latitude ("-" = south), longitude
("-" = west), time zone, location honors daylight time. So no size or shape
for the zone itself, only a location within the zone.

An algorithm might find the geographically nearest ZIP code position for a
given argument position and return that result, but it would likely be wrong
in many situations where there are a lot of ZIP codes, like urban areas.

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draz
that's actually good enough for my purposes :-) (I'm looking to get a zip code
from the browser and then show stores, for example, in a 50 mile radius). 2
adjacent zip codes would still be around 50 miles from the store.

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j0k3r
Nice, but US limited.

