I have a Users Table where it stores city, state and country along with other Users attributes. The states are stored as California, Alabama and so forth. Now I want to retrieve the user information for certain records but the state should get translated to two digit code. Say 'California' should be 'CA'. How should I go about doing this.

I was thinking to create a mapping table for state names with there abbreviation and then use some sort of replace function to do it.

Any ideas ?