How do you perform address validation

Question

Is it even possible to perform address  physical  not e-mail  validation   It seems like the sheer number of address formats  even in the US alone  would make this a fairly difficult task   On the other hand  it seems like a task that would be necessary for several business requirements

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NAICS com is coming out with an API that will add all kinds of key business data including street address  This would happen on the fly as your site s forms are processed  https   www naics com business-intelligence-api

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One area where address lookups have to be performed reliably is for VOIP E911 services  I know companies reliably using the following services for this   Bandwidth com 9-1-1 Access API MSAG Address Validation  MSAG   Master Street Address Guide  https   www bandwidth com 9-1-1   SmartyStreet US Street Address API  https   smartystreets com docs cloud us-street-api

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For us-based address data my company has used GeoStan   It has bindings for C and Java  and we created a Perl binding    Note that it is a commercial product and isn t cheap   It is quite fast though   300 addresses per second  and offers features like CASS certification  USPS bulk mail discount   DPV  Delivery point verification  flagging  and LON LAT geocoding   There is a Perl module Geo  PostalAddress  but it uses heuristics and doesn t have the other features mentioned for GeoStan   Edit  some have mentioned  doing it yourself   if you do decide to do this  a good source of information to start with is the US Census Tiger Data Set  which contains a lot of information about the US including address information

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There are companies that provide this service   Service bureaus that deal with mass mailing will scrub an entire mailing list to that it s in the proper format  which results in a discount on postage   The USPS sells databases of address information that can be used to develop custom solutions   They also have lists of approved vendors who provide this kind of software and service   There are some  but not many  packages that have APIs for hooking address validation into your software   However  you re right that its a pretty nasty problem   http   www usps com ncsc ziplookup vendorslicensees htm

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For US addresses you can require a valid state  and verify that the zip is valid  You could even check that the zip code is in the right state  but beyond that I don t think there are many tests you could run that wouldn t provide a lot of false negatives   What are you trying to do -- prevent simple mistakes or enforcing some kind of identity check

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There is no global solution  For any given country it is at best rather tricky   In the UK  the PostOffice controlls postal addresses  and can provide  at a cost  address information for validation purposes   Government agencies also keep an extensive list of addresses  and these are centrally collated in the NLPG  National Land and Property Gazetteer    Actually validating against these lists is very difficult  Most people don t even know exactly how their address as it is held by the PostOffice  Some businesses don t even know what number they are on a particular street   Your best bet is to approach a company that specialises in this kind of thing

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As mentioned there are many services out there  if you are looking to truly validate the entire address then I highly recommend going with a Web Service type service to ensure that changes can quickly be recognized by your application   In addition to the services listed above  webservice net has this US Address Validation service  http   www webservicex net WCF ServiceDetails aspx SID 24

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Fixaddress com service is available that provides following services   1  Address Validation   2  Address Correction   3  Address spell correcting   4  Correct addresses phonetic mistakes   Fixaddress com uses USPS and Tiger data as reference data   For more detail visit below link   http   www fixaddress com

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You could also try SAP s Data Quality solutions which are available in both a server platform is processing a large number of requests or as an embeddable SDK if you wanted to run it in process with your application  We use it in our application and it s very robust and scalable

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We have had success with Perfect Address   Their database has all the US street names and street number ranges  Also acts as a pretty decent parser for free-form address fields  if you are lucky enough to have that kind of data

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There are a number of good answers in here but most of them make the assumption that the user wants an  quot API quot  solution where they must write code to connect to a 3rd-party service and or screen scrape the USPS   This is all well and good  but should be factored into the business requirements and costs associated with the implementation and then weighed against the desired benefits  Depending upon the business requirements and the way that the data is received into the system  a real-time address processing solution may be the best bet   If a real-time solution is required  you will want to consider the license agreement and technical limitations of the Google Maps Bing Yahoo APIs   They typically limit the number of calls you can make each day   The USPS web tools API is the same in additional they restrict how why you can use their system and how you are allowed to use the data thereafter  At the same time  there are a handful of great service providers that can easily process a static list of addresses   Essentially  you give the service provider a CSV file or Excel file  they clean it up and get it back to you   It s a one-time deal with no long-term commitment or obligation   usually  Full disclosure  I m the founder of SmartyStreets   We do address verification for addresses within the United States   We are easily able to CASS certify a list and we also offer a address verification web service API   We have no hidden fees  contracts  or anything   You use our service until you no longer need it and you can walk away    Unlike cell phone companies that require a contract

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Yahoo has also a Placemaker API  It is good only for locations but it has an universal id for all world locations   It look that there is no standard in ISO list

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You can try Pitney Bowes    IdentifyAddress    Api available at - https   identify pitneybowes com   The service analyses and compares the input addresses against the known address databases around the world to output a standardized detail  It corrects addresses  adds missing postal information and formats it using the format preferred by the applicable postal authority  I also uses additional address databases so it can provide enhanced detail  including address quality  type of address  transliteration  such as from Chinese Kanji to Latin characters  and whether an address is validated to the premise house number  street  or city level of reference information   You will find a lot of samples and sdk available on the site and i found it extremely easy to integrate

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As seen on reddit    address   urlencode  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue  Washington  DC     json   json decode file get contents  http   where yahooapis com geocode q  address amp flags J     print r  json

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Here s a free and sort of  outside the box  way to do it   Not 100  perfect  but it should reject blatantly non-existent addresses   Submit the entire address to Google s geocoding web service  This service attempts to return the exact coordinates of the location you feed it  i e  latitude and longitude   In my experience if the address is invalid you will get a result of 602 from the service  There s definitely a possibility of false positives or false negatives  but used in conjunction with other consistency checks it could be useful    Yahoo s geocoding web service  on the other hand  will return the coordinates of the center of the town if the town exists but the rest of the address is bogus  Potentially useful as long as you pay close attention to the  precision  field in the result

User · Answer

USPS has an address cleaner online  which someone has screen scraped into a poor man s webservice  However  if you re doing this often enough  it d be a better idea to apply for a USPS account and call their own webservice

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In the course of developing an in-house address verification service at a German company I used to work for I ve come across a number of ways to tackle this issue  I ll do my best to sum up my findings below    Free  Open Source Software  Clearly  the first approach anyone would take is an open-source one  like openstreetmap org   which is never a bad idea  But whether or not you can really put this to good and reliable use depends very much on how much you need to rely on the results   Addresses are an incredibly variable thing  Verifying U S  addresses is not an easy task  but bearable  but once you re going for Europe  especially the U K  with their extensive Postal Code system  the open-source approach will simply lack data    Web Services   APIs  Enterprise-Class Software  Money gets it done  obviously  But not every business or developer can spend   0 15 per address lookup  that s  150 for 1 000 API requests  - a very expensive business model the vast majority of address validation APIs have implemented    What I ended up integrating  streetlayer API  Since I was not willing to take on the programmatic approach of verifying address data manually I finally came to the conclusion that I was in need of an API with a price tag that would not make my boss want to fire me and still deliver solid and reliable international verification results    Long story short  I ended up integrating an API built by apilayer  called  streetlayer API   I was easily convinced by a simple JSON integration  surprisingly accurate validation results and their developer-friendly pricing  Also  100 requests month are entirely free    Hope this helps

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I will refer you to my blog post - A lesson in address storage  I go into some of the techniques and algorithms used in the process of address validation   My key thought is  Don t be lazy with address storage  it will cause you nothing but headaches in the future    Also  there is another StackOverflow question that asks this question   Entitled How should international geographic addresses be stored in a relational database

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I have used the services of http   www melissadata com   Their  address object  works very well   Its pricey  yes   But when you consider costs of writing your own solutions  the cost of dirty data in your application  returned mailers - lost sales  and the like - the costs can be justified

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Validating it is a valid address is one thing    But if you re trying to validate a given person lives at a given address  your only almost-guarantee would be a test mail to the address  and even that is not certain if the person is organised or knows somebody at that address   Otherwise people could just specify an arbitrary random address which they know exists and it would mean nothing to you    The best you can do for immediate results is request the user send a photographed   scanned copy of the head of their bank statement or some other proof-of-recent-residence  because at least then they have to work harder to forget it  and forging said things show up easily with a basic level of image forensic analysis

[validation] How do you perform address validation?

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