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Support => Technical support => Topic started by: spor on July 02, 2012, 08:53 am

Title: Problem with character encoding of postal address given to vendor
Post by: spor on July 02, 2012, 08:53 am
Imagine a postal address that contains non-ASCII characters in the name and street. So far I've used a UTF-8 encoded text file encrypted with GPG but a recent shipment had some characters printed unreadable because the sender opened the file with a different encoding, probably ISO.

The shipment arrived anyways but I'm not sure this would happen every time as the address looks quite broken this way. So, how do you make sure the address gets printed properly?

UTF-8 still seems to be a better choice than ISO-8859, as all other international shipments had the address printed correctly. Is it advisable to not use any non-ASCII characters at all? Then the address looks the same all the time, but still not be exactly correct. Maybe that's a small risk, too, and a letter might be sent back and get lost.

What do other people do?
Title: Re: Problem with character encoding of postal address given to vendor
Post by: MrCFindley on July 03, 2012, 03:49 am
I do find it odd that the vendor did not contact you or apparently notice the issue before sending your order out like that (Assuming the address looked as broken as you say). Have  other sellers made the error or needed to contact you for clarification? If it's just the one vendor having issues, it may be best to simply not deal with them in the future.
Title: Re: Problem with character encoding of postal address given to vendor
Post by: spor on July 03, 2012, 11:57 am
>> Have  other sellers made the error or needed to contact you for clarification?

It only happened once with a single vendor out of nine.

>> Assuming the address looked as broken as you say

For example the city of Wörgl in Austria printed on an envelope should look like this:

1234 Wörgl
Österreich

If you open the UTF-8 encoded text with ISO-8859 it looks like this:

1234 Wörgl
Österreich


Anyone familiar with IT will notice the problem instantly but I don't expect this from every vendor. So IMHO there's no one to blame, as there is no "correct" way to encode characters, only different ways and in this case it didn't match.

When there are only a few single characters mis-printed the shipment will still arrive in most cases. I guess the postal service staff and even the automated letter sorting machines have got used to decrypt this stuff. Still it's a problem for addresses with lots of non-ASCII characters and I assume that possibly there have been hundreds of shipments lost because of this issue. It can't be expected that all vendors living anywhere on the world can distinguish UNKNOWN characters from INVALID characters.

A possible solution would be to encourage everyone by policy to always use UTF-8. Or to use plain ASCII all the time.

Do other people send their addresses in native cyrillic/greek/hebrew alphabet? Have you had problems? Or do you always transform everything to latin characters? Does every postal service around the world deliver shipments to this latinized addresses correctly? I'm curious.
Title: Re: Problem with character encoding of postal address given to vendor
Post by: MrCFindley on July 07, 2012, 06:16 pm
Sorry for the late reply. I can't really speak on the subject of foreign postal systems (me dumb 'merikan), however speaking from purely practical prospective, would it really throw off your postal service if you used the plain ASCII characters? It seems like that would be the safer option in the long run.