Hierarchy Indicator (`rphicmsgb`)

The 9-character rphicmsgb indicator used to show which PSGC administrative levels are active in a query or match result.

Author

bendlikeabamboo

rphicmsgb is a compact 9-character convention for showing which PSGC administrative levels a record or query touches. It is a documentation/readability convention — not something the API returns directly — but it is the easiest way to summarize “what kind of place did this match resolve to” in a single glance.

Positions

Position	Letter	Level
1	`r`	Region
2	`p`	Province
3	`h`	Highly urbanized city
4	`i`	Independent component city
5	`c`	Component city
6	`m`	Municipality
7	`s`	Sub-municipality
8	`g`	Special geographic area / unit
9	`b`	Barangay

How to read a strip

Scan left to right: positions holding their letter are active, positions holding 0 are inactive. The active letters are exactly the levels a record’s resolved hierarchy touches — derived from which of the nine resolved-hierarchy fields (region, province, highly_urbanized_city, … barangay) are non-None on that record. Drop the inactive positions and you get a quick label like rp00m00b (“region + province + municipality + barangay”).

Worked examples

Each strip below is built from the record’s actual resolved-hierarchy fields — the level is active in the strip if and only if that field is set on the record.

Query / record	`rphicmsgb`	Active levels	Why
Tongmageng, Tawi-Tawi (`1907005010`)	`rp00m00b`	region, province, municipality, barangay	Tongmageng is a barangay nested under Sitangkai (municipality) → Tawi-Tawi (province) → BARMM.
Barangay 291, City of Manila (`1380602005`)	`r0h000s0b`	region, HUC, sub-municipality, barangay	Manila barangays sit under the City of Manila (HUC) → a district sub-municipality (Binondo).
Tawi-Tawi province (`1907000000`)	`r0p000000`	region, province	A province record resolves only its region and province.
City of Manila HUC (`1380600000`)	`r0h000000`	region, HUC	A highly urbanized city outside the province/municipality chain resolves region + HUC.

Reading the strip

r0h000s0b (Barangay 291, Manila) is exactly the levels a City-of-Manila barangay touches: region → HUC → sub-municipality → barangay. Province, ICC, component city, municipality, and SGA are all 0 because none of those are in the Manila barangay’s resolved chain.

Deriving a strip yourself

The strip is mechanical to produce from any record. For Tongmageng, the resolved fields set to non-None are region, province, municipality, and barangay, so those four positions keep their letters and the rest become 0:

#| eval: false
from barangay import Database

db = Database()
rec = db.barangays.lookup("1907005010")   # Tongmageng
print(rec.to_dict())
# region                       = 'Bangsamoro Autonomous Region In Muslim Mindanao (BARMM)'
# province                     = 'Tawi-Tawi'
# highly_urbanized_city        = None
# independent_component_city   = None
# component_city               = None
# municipality                 = 'Sitangkai'
# submunicipality              = None
# special_geographic_area      = None
# barangay                     = 'Tongmageng'
# → active set {region, province, municipality, barangay} → rphicmsgb = rp00m00b

Not the same as match_type

The indicator is not the SearchResult.match_type string returned by search_fuzzy. match_type reports which name-levels participated in fuzzy scoring (e.g. 'municipality+barangay'); rphicmsgb reports the full resolved hierarchy of the matched record. The two answer different questions.

A known data artifact for Manila

For Barangay 291 (1380602005), the record’s municipality field is also populated (with 'Binondo') as a duplicate of the sub-municipality value — a known artifact of how Manila’s districts are encoded. The canonical rphicmsgb reading for Manila barangays uses the HUC + sub-municipality path (r0h000s0b), reflecting how the PSGC actually nests these records.