Parsing street addresses in Ruby

Question

I am processing addresses into their respective field format for the database. I can get the house number out and the street type but trying to determine best method to get the

Answer 1

I'd recommend using a library for this if possible, since address parsing can be difficult. Check out the Indirizzo Ruby gem, which makes this easy:

require 'Indirizzo'
address = Indirizzo::Address.new("7707 Foo Bar Blvd")
address.number
 => "7707"
address.street
 => ["foo bar blvd", "foo bar boulevard"] 

Even if you don't use the Indirizzo library itself, reading through its source code is probably very useful to see how they solved the problem. For instance, it has finely-tuned regular expressions to match different parts of an address:

Match = {
  # FIXME: shouldn't have to anchor :number and :zip at start/end
  :number   => /^(\d+\W|[a-z]+)?(\d+)([a-z]?)\b/io,
  :street   => /(?:\b(?:\d+\w*|[a-z'-]+)\s*)+/io,
  :city     => /(?:\b[a-z][a-z'-]+\s*)+/io,
  :state    => State.regexp,
  :zip      => /\b(\d{5})(?:-(\d{4}))?\b/o,
  :at       => /\s(at|@|and|&)\s/io,
  :po_box => /\b[P|p]*(OST|ost)*\.*\s*[O|o|0]*(ffice|FFICE)*\.*\s*[B|b][O|o|0][X|x]\b/
}

These files from its source code can give more specifics:

• https://github.com/daveworth/Indirizzo/blob/master/lib/indirizzo/address.rb
• https://github.com/daveworth/Indirizzo/blob/master/lib/indirizzo/constants.rb
• https://github.com/daveworth/Indirizzo/blob/master/lib/indirizzo/numbers.rb

(But I would also generally agree with @drhenner's comment that, in order to make this easier on yourself, you could probably just accept these data inputs in separate fields.)

Edit: To give a more specific answer about how to remove the street suffix (e.g., "Blvd"), you could use Indirizzo's regular expression constants (such as Suffix_Type from constants.rb) like so:

address = Indirizzo::Address.new("7707 Foo Bar Blvd", :expand_streets => false)
address.street.map {|street| street.gsub(Indirizzo::Suffix_Type.regexp, '').strip }
 => ["foo bar"]

(Notice I also passed :expand_streets => false to the initializer, to avoid having both "Blvd" and "Boulevard" alternatives expanded, since we're discarding the suffix anyway.)