Unfortunate XML demand from USPS - 35 character limit address line international

Recently switched to using a broker for International. It has been amazing shipping and better tracking. Here's the kicker.

USPS xml upload of addresses has a character limit of 35 for address lines 1, 2 and 3.

We have a stock ZC limit of 64 and hundreds of customers have more than 35 - some used up all 64.

I see the post below that changes the database character count via phpMyAdmin...

http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?116960-How-to-change-maxlength-of-Street-Address

Question 1 - will this affect our entire database of current customers and chop off/delete their address lines to 35 or just new entries (new account creations)?

Severely scratching my head here. Thanks.

Looks like by doing the following, it then only affects new customers during create_account.

ALTER TABLE address_book MODIFY entry_street_address varchar(35);
ALTER TABLE address_book MODIFY entry_suburb varchar(35);

We will have to now monitor all returning customer international shipments. Quite a drag.

not sure if you're doing something different, but running that command will in fact truncate the existing entries down to 35 characters.. you might want to make sure you didn't just chop off half of your customers' addresses..

I tested on a sandbox and it only affected the entry field of a new account creation.

All customer addresses stayed in tact.

HOLD ON...

I looked at orders, which are unaffected.

The customer address_book table is indeed all cut off.

How can I direct that only new entries have a max characters of 35 and current addresses remain unchanged?