What are postal codes in Sweden?

Position of postal codes in the Netherlands

• Dear reader, I'm searching for a specific file/table containing the positions (x-y) of the postal codes in the Netherlands. The postal code system in the Netherlands is made up of four digits plus two letters (1234 AB would be a valid code). What i am planning to do with this data is to find out how far between two postal codes are. There are about 4000 codes in the Netherlands. I am NOT looking for companies selling these tables, for they tend to be pretty expensive. I am looking for a download link to the file itself (the cheap man's solution...). Thanks for responding,

• Answer:

  Hi Koffie-ga, I think I found what you are looking for. It's a database containing 4895 locations in the Netherlands, together with their locations (longitude and latitude), as well as telephone prefix, city name,... It is given out as freeware and there are dozens of possible applications, such as plotting locations on a map, or as you have suggested, calculating the distance between locations. The database is in DbaseIII format, however you can also open it very easily with Microsoft Access. Just choose "open" from the file menu and change the filetype to "DbaseIII" (if you don't have Access, let me know and I'll send you an exported version of the database). From within Acces, you can export the database to just about any fromat you want, such as comma-seperated plain text file or an Excel file (which might be handy for doing some mathematical transformations on the location coordinates for instance). The postcodes in the database do not include the 2 letter-prefix, however I believe they will still allow you to pinpoint their locations quite accurately. The database has two columns that contain the start and end range of the codes for a certain region. Usually these values are the same, however in certain cities, multiple postal codes are used for the same region. It's quite easy to convert this list into an ordered list containing only the individual postal codes and their coordinates, if you know a little about programming (I can send you such a list if you want). And now, what you've been waiting for - the links: Direct download link: http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/~erikt/.Henk/nl.dbf Explanation: http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/~erikt/.Henk/welcome.html The explanation is in Ducth, however judging by your nickname you know Dutch ;-). If not, I can provide you with additional information. Hope this helps and good luck with the development of your application, rhansenne-ga. Search terms used: database, databank, postcodes