So you are looking for three or more lines together, the last ending in something that looks like a post code...

$letter =~ m/((?:[^\n]+\n){2,}[^\n]*?[a-zA-Z]+[0-9]+\s+[0-9]+[a-zA-Z]+\s*?\n)\s*?\n/

...seemed to do the trick, where the entire letter was read into $letter. Obviously this will miss addresses with no post code or really rubbish post codes. You could just extract all groups of 3 or more lines, and then apply some more cunning address recogniser to the result -- perhaps from one of the modules recommended elsewhere.

(I haven't tried to figure out how much work this is asking the regex engine to do on difficult input. I'd worry about that only if it becomes a problem.)

In reply to Re^3: Extracting a (UK) Address by gone2015
in thread Extracting a (UK) Address by ropey

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.