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When we put our mail on vacation hold, it validates and 'normalizes' the address, so I do understand what you're working with.
Where I grew up, our address was RR#1; it wasn't until I was in my teens that we had an address with a number and street name.
So.. consider this.. are you only dealing with P.O. and its variants or do you have R.R. addresses as well?
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RR, CR, HC, etc., as well as regular street addresses (as best as those are).
Perfect accuracy is not necessary, just best guess.
Marc
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Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Well, then just parse the city & state/province and geocode to the center of that.
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Tim Carmichael wrote: RR#1
Rolls Royce #1?
Homeless billionaire?
[sidebar]
Reminds me of The Bumpkin Billionaires which I used to read as a kid.
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I think the counties try to eliminate RR addresses when they implement 911 emergency service.
Ambulance dispatcher: Code red, RR 23, box 99
...
Ambulance navigator: We are on the correct Route... 1 mailbox, 2 mailbox, etc...
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Excellent point. Are there services that allow you to force user input validation of addresses against the USPS databases?
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Marc Clifton wrote: The one with the 'K' is interesting. 'K' is on the opposite side of the keyboard -- I can understand the 'S'.
Maybe this happened to your user?
Just kidding - O and K are nearby, so he probably hit K accidentally along with BO and missed the X
Or maybe he went for BOKS and missed the S, who knows?
Cheers,
विक्रम
"We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread
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See, isn't programming fun!?
Jeremy Falcon
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I smell OCR in the mix - hence the BOK, BOS, B0X, etc.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: I smell OCR in the mix - hence the BOK, BOS, B0X, etc.
Ah - excellent point!
Marc
Latest Article - Create a Dockerized Python Fiddle Web App
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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And I thought parsing dates that had been defined as strings or ints or decimals was a nightmare.
Maybe there is a need for an AI to second guess what the user might have meant.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Woah... haven't seen you in a long time Chris. How's it going these days?
Cheers,
विक्रम
"We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread
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i'm here occasionally. not constantly, as previously.
it goes... on and on and on and on.
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I still remember your old profile pic - with hand on your thoughtful face. Got it somewhere?
Cheers,
विक्रम
"We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread
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Vikram A Punathambekar wrote: Got it somewhere
He probably has his face at the same bbody place you have yours.
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Smarty pants
Cheers,
विक्रम
"We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread
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Randomly throw them to various fields. They might not be bright enough to notice.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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We have several times received paper mail where the entire name/address is no more than an alphabet soup - yet it is delivered to us no more than one day delayed.
First time this happened we were really puzzled: How could the mailman know that the mail is intended for us? (It is!) Finally we realized that a keyboard "Left shift" operation would give our name and address correctly. Later, we have seen both right and left shifts, of one hand or both hands. I asked a mail guy about it, and he confirmed that is is well known: If name/address looks like alphabet soup, chances are 9 in 10 that a keyboard shift changes it to a sensible address.
Maybe you should include full and partial (i.e. one-hand) right and left shifts in your user input parsing. But don't expect the shift machine instructions to be of great help for this task
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I did an mailing list cleanup like this in the Jurassic era using dBase ][. I ended up trimming excess blanks, doing upper/lower case normalization and translation table lookup for common variants to translate. I don't remember how I identified exceptions back then, but now I'd use a dialog with options to add a option to manually correct, ignore (add to lookup as IGNORE string), add a translation record.
Then there is the problem of dealing with addresses foreign to your country ... whew!
Yup, this a problem to be managed, not solved, if unfiltered inputs are continuously added.
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My guess on the "K" is that some robot filled it in based on a record created via OCR.
The United States Post office has a service you can use to "normalize" addresses. I suspect that each country has something similar.
There is probably a service provider that aggregates all of these normalization services into one spot. (Amazon?)
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Marc Clifton wrote: The one with the 'K' is interesting. 'K' is on the opposite side of the keyboard -- I can understand the 'S'.
Optically Corrupted Recognition?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Your could fashion the UI to eliminate the need to parse P.O. Box... etc.
Have a drop down that contains these options: Street #, P.O. Box, RR#, CR, HC, etc
And to the right of it, place a text box that accepts the actual number.
Just a thought off the top.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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