Parse usable Street Address, City, State, Zip from a string [closed]

Answer 1

There are data services that given a zip code will give you list of street names in that zip code.

Use a regex to extract Zip or City State - find the correct one or if a error get both. pull the list of streets from a data source Correct the city and state, and then street address. Once you get a valid Address line 1, city, state, and zip you can then make assumptions on address line 2..3

Answer 2

For ruby or rails developers there is a nice gem available called street_address. I have been using this on one of my project and it does the work I need.

The only Issue I had was whenever an address is in this format P. O. Box 1410 Durham, NC 27702 it returned nil and therefore I had to replace "P. O. Box" with '' and after this it were able to parse it.

Answer 3

+1 on James A. Rosen's suggested solution as it has worked well for me, however for completists this site is a fascinating read and the best attempt I've seen in documenting addresses worldwide: http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/postal.html

Answer 4

I think outsourcing the problem is the best bet: send it to the Google (or Yahoo) geocoder. The geocoder returns not only the lat/long (which aren't of interest here), but also a rich parsing of the address, with fields filled in that you didn't send (including ZIP+4 and county).

For example, parsing "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA" yields

{
  "name": "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, USA",
  "Status": {
    "code": 200,
    "request": "geocode"
  },
  "Placemark": [
    {
      "address": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA",
      "AddressDetails": {
        "Country": {
          "CountryNameCode": "US",
          "AdministrativeArea": {
            "AdministrativeAreaName": "CA",
            "SubAdministrativeArea": {
              "SubAdministrativeAreaName": "Santa Clara",
              "Locality": {
                "LocalityName": "Mountain View",
                "Thoroughfare": {
                  "ThoroughfareName": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy"
                },
                "PostalCode": {
                  "PostalCodeNumber": "94043"
                }
              }
            }
          }
        },
        "Accuracy": 8
      },
      "Point": {
        "coordinates": [-122.083739, 37.423021, 0]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Now that's parseable!

Answer 5

I don't know HOW FEASIBLE this would be, but I haven't seen this mentioned so I thought I would go ahead and suggest this:

If you are strictly in the US... get a huge database of all zip codes, states, cities and streets. Now look for these in your addresses. You can validate what you find by testing if, say, the city you found exists in the state you found, or by checking if the street you found exists in the city you found. If not, chances are John isn't for John's street, but is the name of the addressee... Basically, get the most information you can and check your addresses against it. An extreme example would be to get A LIST OF ALL THE ADDRESSES IN THE US OF A and then find which one has the most relevant match to each of your addresses...

Answer 6

Try www.address-parser.com. We use their web service, which you can test online