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Re: preg_match() oddities and question

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In article <slrnjcpunb.85q.hellsop@nibelheim.ninehells.com>,
 "Peter H. Coffin" <hellsop@ninehells.com> wrote:

> 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.

I thank you for your input, but I still maintain that my examples 
could be parsed by using a regular expression, and unless explicitly 
told so by using examples will I admit otherwise :-D

No offense, though.


-- 
Sandman[.net]

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Thread

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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