[zettabomb]

I fail to see how you can claim this to work for sites which serve areas outside the United States, but have either no ZIP code, an overlapping code, or something else entirely. Germany has 5 digit PLZs, but putting some valid ones in doesn't get a result. It really seems like the author does not think about other countries.

I don't disagree with reordering the entry by relevance, but you have to start with country. That can also be a nice search - it will be a very short lookup, even if you put every country name in every language. Only after that is postal code (of whatever kind - it's only ZIP in the US) relevant.

[kiliankoe]

As a side note, it's 2026, and there's still German software that thinks our postal codes are integers. Mine has a leading zero, and it hasn't been too long since I've seen (German-built!) software that silently truncates the 0 and then complains that it's just 4 digits and should be 5.

[quesera]

This happens in the US too, and even if you're wise enough to treat postal codes as strings (which they are) and not integers, someone is going to paste the data into Excel which will promptly blow things up on you anyway.

[Breza]

Head of data science at a corporation here. People pasting into Excel has been a bane of my job for over a decade.

[quesera]

Yes! I'm sure you know this, but for anyone with similar problems:

You can disable this conversion "feature" in the Excel "Automatic Data Conversions" preference pane.

...and I hope you have better luck getting people in your company to remember this than I have! :)