For the United States, the admin1 code corresponds to the state abbreviation, which makes it very convenient to do a city, state lookup.
However, for countries like Canada where the admin1 code is a number (e.g. 01 for Alberta) it's no longer possible to do a city, state lookup. I looked at the postal codes file for Canada but it doesn't correspond the postal codes to the numerical (I think FIPS) code for the province. So even though the postal code file shows AB for Alberta it doesn't show 01 for that same record so there's no way to correlate the records.
To add insult to injury, in the postal codes file the dataset actually lists AB in the admin1 code field even though in the other file it is entered as 01. Very annoying.
I'm wondering if there are any data files out there that link the numerical FIPS codes for a country's admin1 record to its more human-readable abbreviation.
