This is will be very helpful when creating dynamic select list. The goal is to allow people to search for things around them, without using a post code. While the post code is more exact, I’m trying to avoid the need to do additional parsing and calculation. By using Country > County > City that will be sufficient for most purposes on the user search side.

@Aquarion Your venn diagrams is great. It helps clarify the country relationships. Also the idea of using the post code as a checksum is genius! I’ll have to remember that for future projects.

What’s even worse is when I select UK but am then asked for England/Scotland – why do you need me to tell you? You’ve got the rest of my address and my postcode, work it out yourself! And does it really matter – postage costs are the same either way…

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/6/8735122_5a571c55db.jpg

Second, postally England’s addresses are more divded by county than country, so generically you pick “UK”, but for state you pick “sussex” or “kent” or “London” (London’s special, being both a county and a city). Within that, you have a postal town, so for example when I was living in Letchworth, Hertforshire, England, The United Kingdom, my full postal address was:

[#] My Road
Letchworth
Stevenage
Hertfordshire
SG7 2BB
ENGLAND

In most practical purposes, the postal town confuses people, and is duplicate information anyway as that’s what the “SG” means, so generally forms use “United Kingdom” for the country, you pick a county from the list instead of a State, you have a postal code, and everything Just Works Out.

(Postal code works as a checksum to some extent to, theoetically you can uniquely identify any building in the UK by [Number] + [Postcode], and if the postcode is “SG”, but the address is in “Stansted”, someone’s got something wrong. This is not a relevant piece of information to your question)

The country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The parts that make it up, you can refer to as countries if you want, Wikipedia does, but I’m not sure it’s clear – anyway, as you point out they don’t have country codes and e.g. don’t have seats at the UN or anything else like that. I would expect to see “United Kingdom” in a list of countries; I don’t think anyone in the UK would expect a breakdown into England/Scotland/etc. unless there was some specific reason for that.

England is definitely not a “state” of the UK. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland are all broken up into counties which are vaguely more similar to states (except they don’t really have much autonomous control). Here’s the divisions I’ve used in the past, probably based on ceremonial counties and the like: http://dracos.co.uk/temp/uk-division.txt

You’re going to try when you start looking at the Channel Islands Hope some of that might be helpful.