Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301
The problem is the hardest to parse addresses are also often the hardest to match, making the problem somewhat circular. I wrote about this more in a recent blog on address matching: https://www.robinlinacre.com/address_matching/
Third on right of main,
Tiwi College,
Melville Island, 0822, AU.
You can try to normalize that... But "Main Road" is in another city. Because I wasn't living in a city. There were no road names. And the 3rd position was an empty plot, not the third house. We had a bunch of houses around a strip of land, a few minutes from the airstrip - the only egress.And because I had no idea before I worked on a project where we had to deal with customer data: many companies also use commercial services for address and phone number validation and normalization.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775099> Libpostal: A C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world - 117 points by polm23 on Dec 29, 2018 (25 comments)
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173920> Libpostal: international street address parsing in C trained on OpenStreetMap (mapzen.com) 74 points by riordan on Feb 25, 2016 (7 comments)
With relatively minimal effort, I was able to spin up a little standalone container that wrapped around the service and exposed a basic API to parse a raw address string and return it as structured data.
Address parsing is definitely an extremely complex problem space with practically infinite edge cases, but libpostal does just about as well as I could expect it to.
What are some others?
Addresses are fundamentally unstructured data. You can't validate them structurally. It's trivial to create nonexistent addresses which any parsing library will parse just fine. On the flipside, there's enough variety in real addresses that your parser has to be extremely tolerant in what it accepts--so tolerant that it basically tolerates everything. The entire purpose of a parser for addresses is to reject invalid addresses, so if your parser tolerates everything it's pointless.
The only validation that makes any sense is "does this address exist in the real world?". And the way to do that is not parsing, it's by comparing to a dataset of all the addresses in the world.
I haven't evaluated this project enough to understand confidently what they're doing, but I hope they're approaching this as a search engine for address datasets, and not as a parsing/normalizing library.
IIRC it takes gigs of storage space and has significant runtime requirements.
Also, while it's implemented in C there are language binding for most major languages [1].
It's one of those things where it's most likely best deployed as an independent service on a dedicated machine.
[1] https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal?tab=readme-ov-file#b...