Postcodes

[PerlOfWisdom]

Does anyone know where I can get a list of postcodes and their corresponding addresses? Preferably free.

[whelzer]

Postcodes

I used a commercial product some years back, I think it was called "AFD Postcode..".

Only cost a couple of hundred quid, covered all UK and was easily used from MS-Office, VB, C++ etc.

[Mark Snowdon]

postcodes

You can get a list of all postcodes from the royal mail (or whatever they are called this week).

If you want addresses as well you need PAF which is the Postoffice Address File(?) - you buy the license from the post office and get cd's at regular intervals. PAF is resold by various companies with various software. some just repackage the basic info some adds useful demographic info.

gb mailing (?) used to do it, there are a couple of players who have the market pretty much sewn up

do a google on PAF postcodes and see all the entries

[Vetran]

Re: postcodes

I use AFD and whilst not cheap they do give a good service.

[AtW]

Postcodes

If all you need is to "resolve" a postcode to get a corresponding address, then you can just quickly bang a script together to query one of the many public websites that do just that.

you can also try commercial product called quickaddress (used it for cc checks).

alex

[SupremeSpod]

Why not try MapQuest on the web to find the address from a postcode?

[PerlOfWisdom]

Thanks for all the replies.

I was hoping that someone could point me to a list on the Internet. I've priced up the PAF and for Internet use they want something like 4 grand per year. An internet based unlimited search costs £0.05 per postcode lookup. I can't find a public lookup for postcodes which allows unlimited use - they're all limited to about 20 searches.

I would settle for a postcode zone file - eg "B14 6**" which shows grid references and district.

[RobAnt]

Try Streetmap. It won't give you the full address - house number, etc., but it will pinpoint the place on a map.

[ixplorer]

The db that comes from royal mail is about 5gb and cost me 7k when i got it from royal mail 18mo ago !

-i-

[PerlOfWisdom]

I ended up writing a perl script, using the LWP module, to query Streetmap with every possible postcode sector (eg BD4 6), and parsed the results to get the lattitude and longitude.

This took about 12 hours, so I didn't bother trying to get the full postcode.