I've dealt with this specific issue. I'm sure that you've already found out that ZIP codes are messy beasts (there are actually places where a group of east-west streets will have different ZIPs than the north-south streets that intersect them). You may find Geo::PostalCode will suffice; I've not used it (I used ZIP code data provided by a company called Claritas; my then-employer was a market research firm, and I wrote the routines to deal with it in Fortran). One fairly significant issue is that not all ZIP codes are geographic entities. For example, some large companies have their own, as do some universities. The ZIP code data I dealt with had about 35,000 "real" ZIP codes, and a few thousand ZIP codes which were large businesses, college campuses, etc.

In any case, I'd store the ZIP and their corresponding latitude and longitude in a database, and only go off to Web when a ZIP can't be found.

minor editorial correction

emc

Information about American English usage here and here.

Any New York City or Connecticut area jobs? I'm currently unemployed.

In reply to Re: ZIP code distances by swampyankee
in thread ZIP code distances by jrmtreebeard

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.