address parsing methods

Anybody know of documentation that describes the best way to parse an
address into its components? I'm sure best is a relative term, but surely
there are some basic rules that apply across the board, no?



thanks.

Hi Luther,

Depends very much on the data you've got and what part of the world you're
dealing with.

For example:
5 St John's Retirement Village, 15 St George's St, St Albans
which might also be expressed as:
5/15 St George's St, St Albans

Or how about:
15 de Mayo 1241, Bariloche
where '15 de Mayo' is the street name and '1241' is the street number -
quite common in Spanish-speaking world.

Cheers

I was assuming that there are commonly accepted standards of usage, but
you've demonstrated that if there is a common usage, there are also
acceptable uncommon usages, as well as variants by country.

But to narrow it down, lets start with US only addressing methods. Is there
such a thing as a commonly accepted pattern/method of entering an address?
And is it documented somewhere?

thanks.

The U.S. postal service publishes addressing standards. See pub. 28.

--
Jim Irwin
http://www.holoscenes.com

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:35:23 GMT, jimirwin


BS7666 (a new version is about to be published) is the UK equivalent.

The real problem is simply that most people don't know about and don't
use the standards! Organizations can and do, but they have no control
over J. Public, who writes his or her address as suits themselves. For
example, in the UK a lot of houses have been given names by their
occupiers. These names - which have no official standing - are often
used alongside the street number or even in place of the street
number. Just to confuse the issue there are also properties that ARE
officially known by name! In the UK, there is the further confusion
that I could equally correctly write the name of the country as:

England (I live in England; Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are
equally possible)
Britain
Great Britain
UK
United Kingdom
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (This is the full
offical designation)

Good luck - addresses are a particularly nasty can of worms!

Paul