Yes, we have actually seen some pretty ugly stuff like you mention. Equally bad is "1/2 street" or even "1/8 street". I work for a private company that consolidates public record data for about 1/3 of wisconsin (and growing). Unfortunately, addresses are quite ugly, and we need to build special cases for junk like this thread is about.

We currently have a few thousand lines of perl to parse addresses, and it's integrated with a CASS certified (U.S. postal certification) address correction software, but it's still a big pain.

The worst part about the whole deal is that the government raw data is sometimes truly ambiguous, such as "814 E main st". There's generally no good way to tell whether the "E" should be a unit or a street directional. So then we try both cases against the address correction software, and hopefully only 1 comes back as a match.

Not nearly as bad as a few years ago, when i was maintaining legacy C++ code to try to do this!

Yes we do only have a fixed number of records, currently about 3 million.

In reply to Re: Re: regex negative lookahead behaviour by shemp
in thread regex negative lookahead behaviour by shemp

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.