title: What Is The Most Efficient and Easiest Way To Store a Users Country & State/Province/Suburb/Area In My PHP MySQL Web Application?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24481/what-is-the-best-way-to-store-international-addresses-in-a-database">What is the “best” way to store international addresses in a database?</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>I would like the application to be global; meaning people from multiple countries (namely Australia, New Zealand, The United States and United Kingdom) can place listings. Because different countries have different formats of postcode, different classifications for areas (Australia and America have states, but places like Canada or the UK are different), how do I effectively store of all of this information?</p>
  
  <p>I just can't envision in my head what the MySQL database schema for something like this would look like. I don't need to store any coordinates, just the users country, suburb/city/area and state/province so I can properly classify all of the information and display it on a classified listing.</p>