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copied!<p>I think you should clarify your usage scenario.</p> <p>Unless you're in a very, very limited scenario where you know that the addresses were entered following a strict schema, parsing addresses for content is an extremely hard problem to solve and, usually, quite futile (unless it's the <em>raison d'être</em> of your application).</p> <p>If you're limited to a particular country that has very specific conventions for writing addresses, then using these regex might get you 90% of the way.<br> However, as soon as you have to start accepting foreign addresses, you're screwed.<br> Even if you're a US-centric site, there is a good chance that you may have to be able to accept addresses from US citizen living abroad for instance.</p> <p>Again, it may be OK in a very narrow field, but it's almost always a bad idea to validate or split addresses that were not strictly validated and constrained at the time the user entered them.<br> When you do enforce some strict rules for users to enter their addresses, these end-up being inadequate in a small portion of cases, even in the best address validation components out there.</p> <p>Just a few things that mess up address parsing:</p> <ul> <li>postal codes (Zip codes) are sometimes placed before, after, or may even not exist at all.</li> <li>postal codes follow strict rules: a 10-digit Zip code is probably easy to spot as invalid, but what about a non-existent one? What about more codes such as those used in the UK for instance?</li> <li>What about a place like Hong Kong where you could write the address in either English, Traditional Chinese or Mandarin?</li> <li>What if it's perfectly fine to split your address and write it out of sequence?</li> <li>even if you're just parsing US addresses, there are at least a handfull of ways to describe a PO box: you can also use <em>poste restante</em>, <em>general delivery</em> and then need to add a 4-digit code to the Zip code, which would normally probably not be present at all...</li> </ul> <p><strong>Bottom line is</strong> </p> <p>If getting addresses in a parseable format is really important, be 100% sure that you can get all possible combinations right or you're going to have a percentage of failures that will mean frustrated users and loss sales.<br> If you don't have 100% case coverage then don't enforce strict rules on the user.<br> I can't count the number of websites I gave up purchasing from because they would require a Zip/Postal Code when the place I live in has none.</p> <p>Sorry for the rant, but I think it's important that people wanting to do address validation and parsing think hard about what they're getting themselves in.</p>

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