areacode - search an areacode in a database

Contents

	Overview
	Function
	Supported systems and limitations
	How to get the source and data files
	Installing the package
	Some notes regarding version 2.0
	Copyright
	Credits

Overview

The areacode module together with its database serves as a helper for finding names for area codes. It is freely available, subject to the copyright notice below.

Function

The module exports a few data types and one function. The function resolves a phone number (including the country code) to some text describing the area code found in the phone number. Current descriptions are in german, the database contains german, swiss, and austrian areacodes plus some incomplete data for the US, the UK and the netherlands.

Usage is easy, just have a look into the header file areacode.h.

Supported systems and limitations

The module should run on nearly all systems that have the following characteristics:

• 8 bit bytes

• An unsigned data type with 32 bits. The code makes some checks with the values in limits.h to find such a datatype for itself, if all checks fail, unsigned long is used. This may be overriden by #defining the macro u32 to the datatype needed.

• An ANSI compatible compiler supporting prototypes. The code should also compile with a C++ compiler, the header file uses the #ifdef __cplusplus checks.

• Big or little endian architectures. For something more weird (old Vaxes?) code has to be added.

• Systems with CP437, CP850 or ISO-8859-1 character sets. The "native" format is ISO-8859-1, for the DOS codepages the #define CHARSET_CP850 has to be added when compiling the module.

• DOS (Watcom C/C++ 10.6)

• Windows-NT (Watcom C/C++ 10.6)

• OS/2 2.x (Watcom C/C++ 10.6)

• i386-Linux (egcs 1.03)

The package has some limits as stated below:

• Current language is german.

• The data file contains area codes for germany, austria, switzerland, the netherlands, and some codes for the UK and US.

• The area code including the country code (but not including the international prefix, often 00) may not exceed 8 digits. This may be bumped up to 9 digits if needed with some disadvantages (more complicated code).

• An area code description must be shorter than 256 characters.

How to get the source & data files

You may get the source for the package itself, for the datafile builder and for new datafiles from

ftp://ftp.musoftware.de/pub/uz/areacode/

Note: The datafile builder needs spunk, a C++ class library to compile. You may want to have a look in

ftp://ftp.musoftware.de/pub/uz/spunk/

For convenience, there's also a full archive containing spunk and all other stuff.

Installing the package

For all systems the location of the data file has to be known. The default name (including the path) may be compiled into the module by #defining DATA_FILENAME, or set at runtime (see areacode.h). The Linux makefile will install the data file in a common place, so more than one software package depending on areacode is able to use the data file.

The data file contains a version stamp, to avoid overwriting a newer file by an older one, when installing more than one software package. The program acvers is used to determine the build version, it will output three numbers, the last one is the data file build (the first two are format version numbers that - hopefully - will not change).

Some notes regarding version 2.0

Unfortunately, I was not able to keep binary compatibility for version 2.0. After realizing that the new version would not be binary compatible anyway, I made some more changes that were due for some time (ISO-8859-1 as a native format is an example).

New in version 2.0:

• Source character set is now ISO-8859-1.

• Areacodes may be extensions of other codes. This leads to somewhat more overhead when searching (now using a modified binary search), but the feature was too useful to omit it.

• Detection of duplicate descriptions and partial duplicate descriptions.

• The string pool may now be compressed.

Copyright

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.

Credits

Many thanks to all people that helped developing the module:

• Andreas Kool (akool@kool.f.eunet.de), author of isdnlog, for many suggestions and code testing.

• Norbert Staudt (VKRG.Staudt@t-online.de), who sent me lots of sample programs resolving area codes.

• Andreas Gutzwiller (andy@hippo.proxyon.imp.com), for the swiss area codes.

• Alois Schneider (Alois.Schneider@magnet.at), for the austrian area codes.

• Paul Slootman (paul@wurtel.demon.nl), for the two versions of the area codes for the netherlands

• Michael Reinelt (reinelt@eunet.at), for kicking me until version 2.0 was finished.

areacode.php Letzte Änderung: 26-Mar-2008

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