Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:51 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #100

kimdouglasmason wrote: post #82

An observation: My street address is XXXX Martin Luther King Jr Way, Apt XXX The number of organizations that accept the address, but chop off the apartment number when they send mail because it is too long is ridiculous. Even better, it tends to be government departments. For example, the IRS does this. Martin Luther King Jr Way has to be one of the most common street names in the US. Many orgs can't even get the si…

Pro-tip: no one will ever, ever misdeliver a package addressed to {house#} MLK #{Apt#}. I've lived on an MLK. If you live on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, LSD works just as well. Where MLK is concerned, he has an official holiday, Americans know what those three letters mean.

Post by UrMomReadsHN » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 5:31 AM UTC

WatchDog wrote: post #123

zaroth wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst is when you store it as a string, having learned from others' mistakes, but then upon exporting to CSV... Excel kindly strips the leading 0 and you get a bug report that your software is screwing up the ZIP codes! Took a bit of searching before finding this: https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/handling-leading-zero-in...

Excel is the bane of my existence. I give a lot of speeches about how to preserve data precision. However It seems to be largley in vain, as there is often a lot of back and forth when handling data between different groups, even programmers don't seem immune from screwing up a csv file with excel.

Post by rtb » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 8:41 AM UTC

lucaspiller wrote: post #92

ghshephard wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, in this scenario, it's relatively easy to come up with a good 99.9% solution: Seven text fields will cover greater than 99.9% of users: Name Address Line 1 Address Line 2 City State Country Postal Code So much of that article discussed stuff that was irrelevant - Live in Singapore? Great, just fill in Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. I've done that on many, many sites and it's always worked fine. Don't have a…

My country unfortunately doesn't fit that scenario. Here in the UAE there is no residential postal delivery, so if you want to receive letters you have them sent to a PO Box. Most people usually use their office's, but I have my own. That means you can reach me with simply: PO Box XXXX Dubai UAE For sending parcels to be delivered by a courier you can include a physical address, however most streets here don't have n…

Post by nodata » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 9:41 AM UTC

ianhedoesit wrote: post #118

nodata wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these seven fields all required? Because I don't have an "Address Line 2".

I have never seen anywhere require "Address Line 2." It's only used as a specifier to the address when there are multiple units at the address (office buildings, apartments, and the like).

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 11:27 AM UTC

tombrossman wrote: post #102

jacquesm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what's the proper way to deal with this then? Ask a series of questions and adapt the follow up to the questions depending on the answer given. Starting out with 'select your country' and then expand from there, the more you know the more you can narrow down the remainder of the input. That would be a nice little widget to be able to throw onto a form 'world accurate address input fields'. And for some localities…

Picking an arbitrary starting point like 'country' still has problems. I'm in Jersey Channel Islands, which isn't a country at all (much like Vatican City & other territories). We are British but not part of the UK nor members of the EU. We're served by the British Royal Mail system and use UK-style postcodes, but sometimes when I input my address I must chose a country, so pick UK, which triggers UK VAT on my order.…