Address Parse Challange

[Koya]

Hi,
I am looking for a way to parse an address into different parts. I would like to get the street number, street name, street type, city, province/state,postal code/zip, country from an address. The trick is to get that finromation in whatever way the user might enter the address.
I thought about using Pattern Matching, but it's a little tough for me since I am not all that familiar with it.

example:

22-11 streetname streettype (Dr./Street./Avenue/Court, etc..)
Ottawa, On H4J-5M6

is one way of writing an address. Other ways might not be as straightforward as this one.

Could someone help please? I need functions to extract each of the address parts. I need ideas of how to do it at least.

thanks.

[shahid]

you can use any seprater between street , state etc

eg 22-1 , my street , my state...

etc..

the other way is typical...
first u build a db for all street , states etc...

then search it in the input box when user enter...

the thrid one easy.. but not full fill ur criterea....
put stree , state , apt no in seprate boxes

[Koya]

Hi,

I think you misunderstood me. What I am trying to do is read from a Database that already has Address as oe of it's fields where people had already enetred their complete addresses in that field. I am building a new database based on the current one except I want to be able to read in the Address field and seperate it into Street Number, Street Name, Unit Number, Country, City, Province, Street Type, etc.

Could you help?

[MartinLiss]

Unless the format is the same I would say you are out of luck. Probably the best thing that you could acheive would be to be able to pull out the street number (if you can tell it from an apartment number) and the provence.

[Koya]

Well I think there are limited ways that people write their address in.

I would at least like to try it. I think it can be done with Pattern matching!

Your ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[binduau]

Hi there....
I did this once i am just trying to think where....

Maybe you could use a pattern match for the number portion then
add a marker for every space in the rest of the record , then look for that marker and bung the string from that to the next marker into an array or something while creating an index in the array for that record.

Alternately you could create a temporary table with an autonumber field as the index. Then loop on the records spilting each record at the marker and adding each item to the fields of your temporary table (which has the fields you want).. You could then open a recordset on that table and loop to add the records created to your table????

strsomestring = "1234567890" 'pattern match to look for with
if instr(mystring, strsomestring) then ..........etc...


i am attaching a file which contains a great many string manipulation functions..

Keep me posted as to how you get on, as i am very interested, so much so that if i had the time i would try it myself...



bindu

[Arc]

This is what's happens when you have bad database design.

You should force the user to enter their info in a predictable way. Not allow them to enter it any which way they want.

[Koya]

HI,

Yes. I agree. Althought the database I am using was made by someone else!

agh!!!

[binduau]

Hi There,

You might find this very useful
.....


Go Here For String Examples


bindu