The different regions in France, and their boundaries

[Loiseau]

To the OP:

You would probably find a copy of the Dictionnaire Hachette Encyclopedique invaluable.  I got one with my SuperU points a few years ago, but I am sure you could order one from www.amazon.fr

It's a single volume, about the size of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and under "France" has all sorts of maps of France including "France Administrative" which shows all the departements (or counties) that are shaded in clumps to show to which official region they belong.  As has been pointed out above, these are not necessarily the same as the old provinces such as Flandres, Poitou etc.  It depends if you want the modern regions or the historic ones.

As you no doubt realise, French departements all have a two-figure ID number (the first two figures of the postcodes in that county); these are arranged alphabetically by departement, so Ain is 01; Vosges is 88; and some extra ones - mostly around Paris - are in the 90s. Traditionally these two digits appear at the end of all car registration numbers (though this is about to change, much to the consternation of the French, who love to register where someone comes from by a glance at their number plate).

Angela (85)

 

[powerdesal]

[quote user="Loiseau"]

, who love to register where someone comes from by a glance at their number plate.

Angela (85)

 

[/quote]

So do we, raising questions such as " what is a car from 'x' doing so far over here"?  [:)]

[cassis]

[quote user="Loiseau"]

Traditionally these two digits appear at the end of all car registration numbers (though this is about to change, much to the consternation of the French, who love to register where someone comes from by a glance at their number plate).

[/quote]

Consternation and even outrage in some parts.  Expect a strike and roadblocks by the number plate concessionaries. [;-)]

[andyh4]

[quote user="altyfc"]

Hi cassis

Yes, that's spot on.  Postcodes is a possibility and I suspect we could do it by that method, but getting a co-ordinate data is probably preferred.  Although we are starting with France, we might go on to do the same thing with other countries and it is probably going to be easier for us to have a system that will work across them all rather than being dealing with postcode data which is going to vary from one country to the next.

I hope this is making sense...

Thanks again

Aaron

[/quote]

Aaron

suggest you rethink.  Postcodes will work in every European country, except the British Isles (note sure about Eire) - and will even work in the US.

 

[altyfc]

[quote user="Fay"]Someone working on a French travel site who doesn't know much French and who went there a bit as a child... I'm thinking I won't be rushing to that particular site for reliable information any time soon. Sorry to be a bit harsh but honestly! You're not doing yourself or your employers any favours.[/quote]

Just because I'm not fluent in French and don't spend a large amount of my time living in the country shouldn't mean that I can't produce a good online travel resource.  The reason that I am making enquiries about a particular issue here is because I wish to make the information we have useful and reliable, but perhaps you can't see that.

[quote user="andyh4"]Aaron

suggest you rethink.  Postcodes will work in every European country, except the British Isles (note sure about Eire) - and will even work in the US.[/quote]

Andy... thank you for this.  It's most helpful.  We are coming from a UK perspective as we have done many UK travel sites along a similar theme and have previously been hampered by our now out-dated postcode system.  I hadn't realised this was not commonplace in other countries so I will definitely give further thought to your suggestion.  It may indeed be a better route for us to take afterall...

Thanks again,

Aaron

[Albert the InfoGipsy]

Postcode lookups work reasonably well in the UK if you are only interested in county-level granularity. You could fairly easily build a lookup table using the first three characters. If you want more detailed results then you need to fork over a fair bit of money to RoyalMail for their database. That said, I've used QAS (based on RM's database) to validate addresses down to street level.

The strength of the UK postcode system is that a full postcode typically covers half a dozen houses at most, which is why it's a helluva lot more useful doing a postcode lookup on Multimap for UK addresses than for French ones, where a single code can cover a town of 50,000 inhabitants. The weakness is that it is not consistently formatted so parsing it can be a pain.

The Republic of Ireland does not use postcodes apart from dividing Dublin into areas. Most other European countries use fairly simple postcodes similar to the French approach, although Holland, for example, has a similar system to the UK but using a different format.

Wikipedia has a number of articles explaining various countries' postcode systems.