I recently had to find a way to parse a street address into its component parts, and thought I’d share my adventure.<\/p>\n
The idea is to take a string like “123 S Main Street” and break it apart into the street number (123), the street direction (S), the street name (Main) and the street type (Street).<\/p>\n
At first, I thought that regular expressions would work, but the sheer variety of legal postal street addresses quickly dissuaded me, as did my boss’s misgivings.<\/p>\n
Stackoverflow has a nice discussion of the problem<\/a>, which gave me some additional pointers.\u00a0 There’s a commercial solution<\/a>, which is available as a COM component or a web service–I didn’t try this.\u00a0 There is a free, but application\/attribution required, web service<\/a> provided by a university that did a great job (thanks, California tax payers).\u00a0 This solution is also available in a for-pay variant.<\/p>\n Neither of these were desirable because we needed to parse a lot of addresses quickly, and calling out over the web can be slow.\u00a0 Some more digging turned up this stack question<\/a> and\u00a0 JGeocoder<\/a>, which has a fairly robust address parser.\u00a0 It’s not perfect, but it was free and open source.\u00a0 I am not sure if it is still in development (the author didn’t respond to my email) but it does what we need it to do.<\/p>\n As an added bonus, we’re using pentaho<\/a> for the data processing, and you can call java classes directly<\/a> from your data processing steps<\/a>, so I didn’t even have to wrap the java call in a shell script or anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently had to find a way to parse a street address into its component parts, and thought I’d share my adventure. The idea is to take a string like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-java","category-useful-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}