Parsing "real world" addresses...

[eduardo]

Greetings. I have been looking for a module to (or a Parse::RecDescent grammar) to parse real world "mailing addresses." I have a text file that looks something like:

150 Main Street Nashville, Tennesse 37201
27 Breck Lane #27 Plingo, Maine 44343
1 2nd Av S. Apt 166 Memphis, TN 37373

And whatnot... and I was wondering if there was any modules that had been written to break it up into it's component parts (street, apartment(?), city, zip.)

[benn]

Lingua::EN::AddressParse is pretty good - biased slightly towards Australian addresses, but should be a good start.

Cheers
Ben.

[eduardo]

I hope this gets me a 90% solution without 6 man-months of effort, gotta love code re-use eh, dragonchild? :) I will report my findings later on toda... I should have known it would be in the Lingua namespace. Thanks for the pointer benn.

[crenz]

I'd try an iterative apporach:

• Skim through the list and develop a number of basic regexes to match the adresses. Keep them rather strict and make your code fail (or output the non-matching records) if a record doesn't match any of them.
• Run it, then skim through the list of non-matching records and add more special cases to your rules (again, keep the rules rather strict)

• Go back to previous step until you have reached acceptable accuracy :)

I found this approach to be quite helpful in ensuring that I don't misunderstand records -- ie., thinking your rules match where in reality it is just pure chance and they're producing garbage without you noticing.

[hardburn]

I'm not saying that its impossible, but it seems that there are so many special cases that you'll have a hard time getting through them.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

[dragonchild]

I was working on a data migration project and they spent something like 6 man-months working on this and had a 90% solution. *shrugs* That's good enough, I think. (Of course, they refused to upload their stuff, not that you'd've wanted it anyways ...)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

[halley]

All of your example addresses are USA form, but consider the non-USA case. Every country has a different postal address scheme, and some of it's just "conventional" and not a rigid format.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

[jeffa]

bbbzzzzz .... i am wrong, sorry :(

I haven't tried it yet, but i'll bet that Abigail-II's RFC::RFC822::Address will do the trick.

jeffa

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B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
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(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)