Corrupt (?) Tiger files

[Advay Mengle]

I was looking at some segments.txt files and it seems a few segments have street numbers that are dates (!) instead of numbers, like "Feb-27"

What's going on here?

[C. Scott Ananian (TA)]

It is quite possible that your US government has allowed some errors (gasp!) to creep into their database.  Remember, the tigerdb is a product of the census department.

[Advay Mengle]

It still seems bizzare that street numbers and dates could get mixed up.

It is quite possible that your US government has allowed some errors (gasp!) to creep into their database.  Remember, the tigerdb is a product of the census department.

Yes, but does the govt. provide the segments.txt file?  I thought those were generated from the ZIP files (which *are* original tigerdb files) by ps6.tigerdb.* (or other staff-created) classes.

[avalys]

I know what happened - whoever created that file must have done it in a general-purpose database/spreadsheet program, which interpreted street number ranges like "2-6" as February 6.

I had the exact same problem when I tried to load segments.txt into Excel.  So thoughtful, those Microsoft engineers...

[Advay Mengle]

I know what happened - whoever created that file must have done it in a general-purpose database/spreadsheet program, which interpreted street number ranges like "2-6" as February 6.

I had the exact same problem when I tried to load segments.txt into Excel.  So thoughtful, those Microsoft engineers...

The "misinterpretation" only occurs some of the time, however.  i.e. not all street numbers that could be interpreted as month-day are.