
Frank's Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses - pera
http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/
======
NelsonMinar
I contribute sometimes to OpenAddresses, a project to collect address data for
the entire world from official sources. It's remarkable how complex the schema
for addresses are and how very much hyper-local.

We're used to simple things in the United States like "123 Maple Lane" but
even those addresses can be awfully complex. And then you get oddities like
Portland's 0234 SW Bancroft St; the leading 0 is significant. Hawaii addresses
are like "96-3208 Maile St, Pahala"

Of course it gets much more complicated internationally. India has addresses
like "291, HA Block, Sector III, Salt Lake City, HA Block, Sector III, Salt
Lake City, Kolkata". And much of the world doesn't have any regular address
system at all, going instead by navigational systems like "third left after
the banyan tree, down the road by the dairy."

Previously on HN, a related article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
> the leading 0 is significant.

Word to the wise: Don't store numeric address information in integer fields. I
sometimes see ZIP codes with missing leading 0's.

~~~
ryandvm
My rule of thumb is that unless I'm going to do arithmetic with it, it
probably ought to be a string.

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justboxing
Indian addresses are some of the worst. (I grew up there, so I know).

The article lists some guidelines here =>
[http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/#india](http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/#india)

In reality though, people use all kinds of hints and landmarks in the address
[1].

Example:

TACTV Arasu Sevai Center

O/o J.Er,No.88,Durgadevi Nagar,

6th Cross Street,Extension,

Behind ECI Matric Higher Secondary School,

Tondiarpet,

Chennai-81

Source:
[http://www.chennaicorporation.gov.in/images/ucsc.pdf](http://www.chennaicorporation.gov.in/images/ucsc.pdf)

People inject their own "Old this, old that", or "Next to Mari Amman Koil" (
Name of Temple / Landmark ) or "Behind this school / that landmark" etc.

Compounded by the fact that a lot of South Indian town names and district
names are reeaaaalllly long and a lot of times, I run out of data entry space
when making booking for my fam in India on online travel sites.

Ex: My cousins live in a town called Thillaiganganagar (17 chars). Another
friend of my gramps lives in a place called thiruvananthapuram (18 chars)

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jpatokal
Postal addresses are _really_ complicated and this page makes them look far
simpler and more consistent than they really are. I used to deal with these
all the time when working with geocoding at Google Maps, and I ended up
braindumping a lot of what I learned the hard way into Wikipedia, because for
many countries there's very little documentation available in English:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_addressing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_addressing_system)

~~~
ranma42
Something that could also go into
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system):

Ryūgasaki-shi in Ibaraki is a japanese town that doesn't use cho, so you get
addresses like: 〒301-8611 茨城県龍ケ崎市3710番地 (3710 Banchi, Ryūgasaki-shi, Ibaraki-
ken 301-8611)

Japanese news video about this oddity:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MfFnpx7e6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MfFnpx7e6k)

Apparently they neglected to adopt 町名 (chōmei) subdivisions when the town was
promoted from machi to shi in 1954.

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Symbiote
It took me about 10 tries to put my address in the US ESTA (Visa waiver)
system.

First, it said the Ø in København was no good, so I changed the whole thing to
Copenhagen. Then it changed that to Koebenhavn. Then it complained about the æ
in the street name, which I changed to ae.

Then it kept saying "Street number invalid" or something. The building is
about three years old, but the number wasn't in their database.

I tried several combinations of splitting the building number and apartment
number between three boxes before one passed validation.

Then my application was "held for manual review".

I left the bit on social media aliases blank.

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privong
The page is now giving a 404 error (maybe was removed after the traffic
spike?). But here's the most recent archive.org mirror:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180430071524/http://www.columb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180430071524/http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/)

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tannhaeuser
There's also the UPU S1 standard for a common vocabulary for postal addresses.
A couple of years ago I was working on implementing it for a large logistics
customer. Postal addresses are actually a field where XML can be put to good
use. An international address would look like a piece of semistructured text
with all formatting into multiple lines etc. preserved, with portions of text
such as ZIP codes, names, etc. tagged with elements.

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paganel
We don't really use postal-codes for Romania, at least not for big cities (I
live in Bucharest). The reason is that nobody really knows them, every time I
have to fill up a form on a non-Romanian website which has the postal-code as
a mandatory field I have to actually look up which postal code is attached to
my address.

We use the street name, street number, the building's name if needed (for
example my building/block of flats is named "12", but the building sits at
number 91) and the entrance name (which usually is a capital letter, starting
from A). And of course the apartment number. For individual houses is simpler,
you just need the street name and the street number, and for houses located in
small villages you just need to put the village name and the person to whom
your letter/package is addressed, the postman knows how to get to that person.

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anotheryou
I hope I never again have to write a concept for the UI and validation of
international addresses again...

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bumbledraven
The use of plus codes for addresses would simplify mail delivery and vehicle
routing in many parts of the world. [https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

~~~
wtmt
I just tested this on Google Maps. Dropped a pin, copied the plus code from
the details section, pasted it again in the search box and hit Search. No
results!

Tried it a couple of more times for slightly different locations, but the same
issue.

This makes it seem like it’s not ready for prime time.

------
Bluecobra
There’s something oddly satisfying skimming through all these addresses in
Courier New. Maybe I was a mailman in my previous life.

