Comments on: Converting US State names into their Abbreviations (and back!)

By: LeberMac

LeberMac — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:38:40 +0000

Sean, great PHP script, and useful!

I do a good bit of mailing work over here in the states, and I think I’ll crib your PHP code and work something up.

One note, you could also add
Puerto Rico –> PR
Guam –> GU

And also – adding the Canadian province abbreviations would be super-useful, a lot of times when mailing we’ll get some Canadian addresses thrown in there.

Thanks and keep rockin’ the code…

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:41:36 +0000

Hi Jonah, not surely sure what you mean there but on revisiting my code I am being a little bit overeager with the case changes. Abbreviations will always be upper case so it doesn’t need changing. The strtolowers on the name check are, however, relevant as remember half of the check is coming from an unknown source and needs to be sanitised.

The line $return = strtoupper($state['abbrev']); can just be $return = $state['abbrev']; if we were being fussy but ultimately it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

thanks
Sean

By: jwerre

jwerre — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:05:47 +0000

Thanks James, this is helpful. One suggestion:

if ($state['name'] == strtoupper($name)){
$return = $state['abbrev'];
break;
}

No need to change case to lower then uppper and then back again

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:53:34 +0000

Hi James,

you are indeed correct. For some reason it worked at the time. Must have been either a fluke or me being negligent Sorted now though!

thanks
Sean

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:59:06 +0000

Code works great and saved me a hassle. Thanks for sharing.

By: James

James — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 13:10:44 +0000

The problem with the code is that there is a typo in the array. The second elementshould read “abbrev” and you have it reading “apprev”, so the function doesnt work.

Best,

James