German PLZ: five digits and a flexible address form
Preserve leading zeros and keep the town attached to the postal sample.
Preserve all five digits
Store the Postleitzahl as text. Leading zeros are meaningful. A typical display puts the street and house number on one line, followed by PLZ and locality. A federal state can be useful for a database without being mandatory on every mailing label.
Separate spelling from geography
Support umlauts and ß without deleting the original characters. The same state may appear under German and English names in upstream data; fakeloc normalizes known state aliases before sampling. It does not translate arbitrary street names into a different place.
Useful regression cases
Try leading-zero postcodes, apartment details, accented town names and CSV re-import. Our source manifest identifies the selected GeoNames rows. Use Deutsche Post lookup when you need a current postal destination rather than a synthetic UI fixture.