I'm parsing snail mail addresses, particularly for horrible beasts like "456 4 1/2 MILE RD".

Meta advice:

I've been involved with two projects over the years that have had to parse names and addresses. In both cases, what we ended up with was a system that got ~98% right automatically, then kicked out the remaining 2% for vetting by a human.

It's a diminishing returns problem: If you model the economics, at some point you have to stop pouring your effort into matching the remaining pool of difficult addresses, and let a human being do it.

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

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