General Address Parser for Freeform Text

Question

We have a program that displays map data (think Google Maps, but with much more interactivity and custom layers for our clients).

We allow navigation via a set of combo

Answer 1

Incidentally, have you seen a new API endpoint that SmartyStreets is experimenting with? It extracts addresses from text and validates them and converts them into components.

Refer to this other Stack Overflow post which goes into more detail. I work at SmartyStreets and helped to develop it, so I can tell you that this is a very hard problem, even if from the surface it seems simple.