Make the postal code field optional for China

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To clarify the statement above, the addressing standards for Hong Kong, the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan (the Republic of China) are all different.

I'm using two sources for the information below:

• The Universal Postal Union's Postal addressing systems in member countries web tool. To use this tool, choose the addressing area from the drop-down at the top ("HongKong - China (People's Rep.)" or "China (People's Rep.)") and click "Display".
• Taiwan (Republic of China) is not a member of the UPU (see the Wikipedia article on the UPU for background); so I'm using it's post agency's postal writing guide.

Hong Kong uses addressing standards that look more familiar to us in Canada+Britain+US (i.e.: from the smallest geographical component (i.e.: apartment number, street number) to the largest geographical component (i.e.: province, country — I'll call this "English-style" for now).

The PRC uses different address formats depending on whether the address is written in Chinese or Latin characters. If the address is written in Latin characters, it uses "English-style". However, if the address is written using Chinese characters, it is written from the largest geographical component (i.e.: country, province) to the smallest (i.e.: street number, apartment number).

The ROC uses a similar addressing system to the PRC (I am terribly slow at reading Chinese, so I'm still trying to translate the attached image found here). At first glance, however, the official guide seems to correspond with the Wikipedia article mentioned below...

For a more-concise summary of all these, see Wikipedia's article on addresses:

• Hong Kong
• People's Republic of China
• Taiwan (Republic of China)

A co-worker of mine translated the rest of the image for me (thanks! ^_^). Note that it's the format for national mail (sent within Taiwan).

The format is:

Postal code
City City district
Street Street section Street number
Person / company's name Optional salutation

The format for International mail is explained here.

I would be happy to try and build a patch for Hong Kong, but is this already being worked on?

@carn1x: please go ahead! I haven't had as much time to work on this as I would like, so anything you can do would be helpful!

Ok, I'll have a go at it, will hopefully have something in a week or so.

EDIT: Actually I was preparing myself for something a bit more comprehensive, but really the only change HK needs is to have the Postal Code field removed.

Any updates on this? Still need the address fields corrected for Taiwan (ROC)!

Thanks!

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I made a plugin for China mainland address format, please review.

Sorry the above patch is empty, re-upload the patch

I like it. Thanks a lot.

Pre-loading all the city names might be an overkill, and definitely much more work. We should commit this first for now.

Please review.

There are a couple of typos in this patch. Also, could we try to simplify this and merge it in address.inc?

We are going to need to refactor this module completely if we want it to stay maintainable... :(

Just modify some typos from the edx's patch "add_chinese_format_plugin-1218304-15.patch ". Here is the patch!

Merge the chinese address plugin into address.inc, please review

This is a duplicate of
#1829900: [meta] Address Field 2.x needs pluggable administrative areas and an actual API

If you think so to, please close your ticket.

1) According to the Universal Postal Union and Google's dataset, the postal code is not optional, but required.
2) The administrative areas must be in pinyin chinese, keyed by iso codes. I've opened a separate issue that adds just them: #2389517: Add administrative areas for China.

The current addressfield code already adds a dependent_locality field for China, with the correct District label.

Sources:
http://www.upu.int/fileadmin/documentsFiles/activities/addressingUnit/ch...

The administrative areas have been added in #2389517: Add administrative areas for China.
I've also made tweaks to the field order.

Attaching the screenshot of the address form as rendered by the latest 7.x-1.x.

The remaining task is to make the postal code optional. The proof for that will be uploaded by skyredwang.

One more thing: Postal Code in China is not required by many people, maybe we can remove the requirement.

Based on my research:

Top 3 eCommerce sites in China: Taobao (Alibaba), YHD.com and XiaoMi (mi.com); Taobao and XiaoMi require postal codes, YHD doesn't require.

Top 3 Mail service providers in China: China Postal Express, S.F. Express, and Y.T. Express; they do not require postal codes.

I'd like to hear other Chinese developers' opinion on if we should remove postal code requirement as default.

Screenshots and proofs will be uploaded.

Do you think they don't require it because they automatically look it up via some web service?

I have attached 3 examples:

The 1st example is from China Postal Express https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/IMG_20150113_211412.jpg ; both the sender and the receiver's zipcode are empty (optional)

The 2nd example is from S.F. Express https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/IMG_20150113_211322.jpg ; there is no zipcode field

The 3rd example is from Y.T. Express https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/IMG_20150113_211352.jpg ; zipcode is not required

Made the postal code field optional, thank you for the research.

2019-01-05:
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Is there any way to have postal codes simply NOT appear if the country involved is Hong Kong?

In Hong Kong there are NO postal codes. Instead, there is a hierarchical, tiered addressing system that looks like this:

Address (Floor)
Village Name
District (there are 18)
Area (there are 3)
Hong Kong S.A.R.
China

Districts:

1. Islands
2. Kwai Tsing
3. North
4. Sai Kung
5. Sha Tin
6. Tai Po
7. Tsuen Wan
8. Tuen Mun
9. Yuen Long
10. Kowloon City
11. Kwun Tong
12. Sham Shui Po
13. Wong Tai Sin
14. Yau Tsim Mong
15. Central & Western
16. Eastern
17. Southern
18. Wan Chai

Areas:

A. Hong Kong Island
B. Kowloon
C. New Territories