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A couple of months ago, when I first began looking at ways to extract location data from a user-specified location, I was grabbing city, state, county, and zip from the address component array. I should have used the locality, administration level, and postal code type values to help me out, but, for U.S. addresses, I saw that postal code always appeared last, preceded by country, state, county, and city. Using address component array position was a sloppy algorithm which I've changed now, but I'm trying to figure out when the postal_code_suffix was added on a large-scale basis.

It seems that just in the past month or so, most U.S. locations queried now come back with a last address component of postal_code_suffix and the 4-digit code that is optionally appended to zip codes.

My question is, when was ZIP+4 (postal_code_suffix) adopted on a widespread basis for U.S. addresses within the Google Maps API? I can't find anything on the Google Maps API site. This Stackoverflow answer implies that ZIP+4 was not implemented as of March 2013

I want to be able to provide the customer with a specific time-frame in which errors began happening. (The last element of the array is no longer ZIP in most cases).

I realize this question is not particularly technical in nature, but the Google Maps API discussion forums direct users here, and I have looked extensively elsewhere for an answer.

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bullcitydave
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Every 6 months or so there is a release of the Google Maps Javascript API v3.
The change log indicates the last update was September 2014, but that tends to lag, I seem to recall a flurry of activity in the last couple of weeks that might have been an update.

Looks like the official roll out of v3.18 as the release version was November 18th:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-maps-js-api-v3-notify/-GqD0WKdYnM

geocodezip
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  • Thanks for the info on where to find the change history to the API. I edited my question to better reflect that it's a data question. I can see that postal_code_suffix has been around for awhile, since that suffix is critical in countries outside of the U.S. I'd like to figure out when this value was set for U.S. addresses, as it seems to have been in the past month. – bullcitydave Dec 05 '14 at 17:41