Package: locales Version: 2.40-3 Severity: normal /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_CA and /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_CA contain the following postal_fmt locale string: "%f%N%a%N%d%N%b%N%s %h %e %r%N%z %T%N%c%N". Unfortunately, this is not correct, and to my knowledge the format it describes has never been used in Canada. I should note that there are other locales for Canada, which I have not verified, but their formats will be the same.
As an example of a valid address for a regular building in English, take Toronto City Hall: City of Toronto 100 Queen St W Toronto ON M5H 2N2 or the same address in French: Ville de Toronto 100 Rue Queen O Toronto ON M5H 2N2 If we'd like to address the councillor serving the district including city hall, whose office is in suite C54, we'd write this: Councillor Ausma Malik City of Toronto C54-100 Queen St W Toronto ON M5H 2N2 or in French: Conseillère Ausma Malik Ville de Toronto C54-100 Rue Queen O Toronto ON M5H 2N2 For mailing internationally, the address may be followed on the next line by the country, written as "Canada". Note that the two-letter code for the province is "ON", for Ontario; territories are also written the same way, with a two-letter code. The postal code is usually written with a space in the middle of the six characters. It is also acceptable, but less preferred, to write the address like so, assuming the unit type is known: Councillor Ausma Malik City of Toronto 100 Queen St W Suite C54 Toronto ON M5H 2N2 This can be written in French similarly. Another acceptable, but less preferred, variation is to place a comma after the city: "Toronto, ON M5H 2N2". Note that for non-institutional recipients, the format simply omits the institution name: Justin Trudeau 24 Sussex Dr Ottawa ON K1M 1M4 The locale string here would have us write this for our councillor: City of Toronto Queen St W 100 C54 M5H 2N2 Toronto Note that the person's name is omitted entirely in the format, which is neither customary nor desirable. While it is possible Canada Post might deliver something addressed that way, it is definitely not considered acceptable and they would be displeased about it. Delivery, if it happened at all, would be delayed. As a relevant note, Canadian addresses resemble in many ways those of the United States, so the en_US template might be a good starting point. U.S. addresses do not place the apartment or suite number before the street number and always use the unit type and number following the street address on the same line, but otherwise the formats are identical. However, Puerto Rico addresses, which are served by the United States Postal Service and use the U.S. format, use the same incorrect format as for Canada in the es_PR locale. One final note: it appears that the incorrect Canadian format string is used in a variety of locales for very different countries. I have no actual evidence for my claim, but it seems improbable that Belgium, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, the Republic of Ireland, Argentina, and Uruguay, among many others, all use exactly the same address format. Perhaps a copy-paste error has occurred. -- System Information: Debian Release: trixie/sid APT prefers oldstable-security APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-security'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 6.10.12-amd64 (SMP w/20 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_USER, TAINT_WARN Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_CA:en Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages locales depends on: ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.87 ii libc-bin 2.40-3 ii libc-l10n 2.40-3 locales recommends no packages. locales suggests no packages. -- debconf information: locales/default_environment_locale: en_CA.UTF-8 locales/locales_to_be_generated: en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8, en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8, es_MX.UTF-8 UTF-8, es_US.UTF-8 UTF-8, fr_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8, fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8 -- brian m. carlson (they/them or he/him) Toronto, Ontario, CA
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