I really think that you're going to have to come up with a regex for each country -- some of them could be re-used, but that weirdness of UK postcodes is going to force you to develop your own system for them.
You could, for example, have a hash of regexes, and use the first column as the key. $regexes{'GB'} would be the one that dealt with your SW1 example, and it would be something like /\w+(\d+)(\w)?\s\w+(\d+)/ and test the values in $1 and $3.
But in fact, come to think of it, you'd need at least two for the UK because as you can see, London postcodes have a different format to ones outside London.
I wonder whether the UK postal authorities have some kind of database or flat-text file you could grab and munge.
--
Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.
M-J D
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