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Re: preg_match() oddities and question

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On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:55:22 +0100, Sandman wrote:

> In article <3004614.SPkdTlGXAF@PointedEars.de>, Thomas 'PointedEars'
> Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> wrote:
>
>> >> "10 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017, USA".
>> >
>> > That wouldn't be a normal swedish address, no. :)
>>
>> You had not limited the country or the language of your street
>> addresses.
>
> Well, to my defense, the subject line was "preg_match() and swedish
> characters" until I changed it. I hadn't changed it when I wrote my
> examples.
>
>> My point is that parsing a street name and a house number from a
>> street address is a hard problem that cannot be solved only by
>> applying one regular expression.
>
> Right, but your example is not a valid argument for that conclusion.
> My examples contained the variations of addresses that I wanted
> to match. Or are you saying that there is no way to use regular
> expressions to catch the examples I gave? Because I have a hard time
> believing that.

Address-matching is a hard task. I did that for a decade professionally
(as part of a job, not the sole function), and it's not easy to do well
for even one postal system, and trying to write a generalized one is
basically impossible to manage in one lifetime. The best *simple* way
to manage it is to take a field, blow it out into individual words,
standardize all the words you can find without trying to sort out
what they are (which is the Very Hard part of that task), throw the
alphabetic ones into soundex or nysiis, make a loose match by a chunk of
postal code or city code or province, then pick the item(s) that have
the greatest number of matches between incoming and loose-match record
of the numeric and nysiis-encoded alphabetical elements. If you weight
things like "numeric match = 1, plaintext that's in a dictionary that
matches when nysiis = 2, nondictionary text that matches nysiis = 3",
and do that for NAME as well as ADDRESS, you get about as good as you
can get without buying someone else's work. And that's STILL a lot of
effort to write. Regexp alone for address matching is a snipe-hunt. It
looks obviously right and you can spend a lot of time playing with it,
but it ends up being a dead end.

-- 
_  o
 |/)

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preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-22 12:21 +0100
  Re: preg_match() oddities and question The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-11-22 11:26 +0000
    Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-22 12:36 +0100
    Re: preg_match() oddities and question Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2011-11-22 07:22 -0500
  Re: preg_match() oddities and question tony@mountifield.org (Tony Mountifield) - 2011-11-22 11:47 +0000
    Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-22 13:12 +0100
  Re: preg_match() oddities and question Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-22 13:30 +0100
    Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-22 13:55 +0100
      Re: preg_match() oddities and question Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-22 17:56 +0100
        Re: preg_match() oddities and question The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-11-22 17:30 +0000
          Re: preg_match() oddities and question "Peter H. Coffin" <hellsop@ninehells.com> - 2011-11-22 17:20 -0600
            Re: preg_match() oddities and question The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-11-22 23:59 +0000
            Re: preg_match() oddities and question Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-23 01:59 +0100
              Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-23 09:58 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-23 22:02 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-24 08:20 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2011-11-24 12:55 +0000
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-25 09:36 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-24 22:41 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-25 09:26 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-25 15:44 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-25 16:34 +0100
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-25 23:23 +0100
              Re: preg_match() oddities and question The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-11-23 09:35 +0000
        Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-23 09:55 +0100
          Re: preg_match() oddities and question "Peter H. Coffin" <hellsop@ninehells.com> - 2011-11-23 07:53 -0600
            Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-23 19:01 +0100
              Re: preg_match() oddities and question The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-11-23 18:54 +0000
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-23 20:23 +0100
              Re: preg_match() oddities and question "Peter H. Coffin" <hellsop@ninehells.com> - 2011-11-23 12:58 -0600
                Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-24 08:28 +0100
  SOLVED: Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-25 10:32 +0100
    Re: SOLVED: Re: preg_match() oddities and question Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2011-11-25 18:55 -0500
      Re: SOLVED: Re: preg_match() oddities and question Sandman <mr@sandman.net> - 2011-11-26 11:21 +0100

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