regex street address match

Question

While I know that matching a street address will never be perfect I\'m looking to create a couple of regex statements that will get close most of the time.

I\'m tr

Answer 1

Matt is right. Regex parsing is never going to be very accurate. You'll inevitably have a reasonable number of false positives and false negatives if you go down this dangerous road. However, if you're okay with that, I actually like to use a combination of two regexes - one for street named based schemes and one for city grid schemes:

Street Name System:

/\b\d{1,6} +.{2,25}\b(avenue|ave|court|ct|street|st|drive|dr|lane|ln|road|rd|blvd|plaza|parkway|pkwy)[.,]?(.{0,25} +\b\d{5}\b)?/ig

Grid System

/(\b( +)?\d{1,6} +(north|east|south|west|n|e|s|w)[,.]?){2}(.{0,25} +\b\d{5}\b)?\b/ig

Also note that if the address doesn't have a state and zipcode, you can basically forget about extracting any text that goes after the street moniker.