How do you perform address validation? [closed]

Answer 1

You can try Pitney Bowes “IdentifyAddress” Api available at - https://identify.pitneybowes.com/

The service analyses and compares the input addresses against the known address databases around the world to output a standardized detail. It corrects addresses, adds missing postal information and formats it using the format preferred by the applicable postal authority. I also uses additional address databases so it can provide enhanced detail, including address quality, type of address, transliteration (such as from Chinese Kanji to Latin characters) and whether an address is validated to the premise/house number, street, or city level of reference information.

You will find a lot of samples and sdk available on the site and i found it extremely easy to integrate.

Answer 2

For US addresses you can require a valid state, and verify that the zip is valid. You could even check that the zip code is in the right state, but beyond that I don't think there are many tests you could run that wouldn't provide a lot of false negatives.

What are you trying to do -- prevent simple mistakes or enforcing some kind of identity check?

Answer 3

USPS has an address cleaner online, which someone has screen scraped into a poor man's webservice. However, if you're doing this often enough, it'd be a better idea to apply for a USPS account and call their own webservice.

Answer 4

There is no global solution. For any given country it is at best rather tricky.

In the UK, the PostOffice controlls postal addresses, and can provide (at a cost) address information for validation purposes.

Government agencies also keep an extensive list of addresses, and these are centrally collated in the NLPG (National Land and Property Gazetteer).

Actually validating against these lists is very difficult. Most people don't even know exactly how their address as it is held by the PostOffice. Some businesses don't even know what number they are on a particular street.

Your best bet is to approach a company that specialises in this kind of thing.

Answer 5

Yahoo has also a Placemaker API. It is good only for locations but it has an universal id for all world locations.

It look that there is no standard in ISO list.

Answer 6

Here's a free and sort of "outside the box" way to do it. Not 100% perfect, but it should reject blatantly non-existent addresses.

Submit the entire address to Google's geocoding web service. This service attempts to return the exact coordinates of the location you feed it, i.e. latitude and longitude.

In my experience if the address is invalid you will get a result of 602 from the service. There's definitely a possibility of false positives or false negatives, but used in conjunction with other consistency checks it could be useful.

(Yahoo's geocoding web service, on the other hand, will return the coordinates of the center of the town if the town exists but the rest of the address is bogus. Potentially useful as long as you pay close attention to the "precision" field in the result).