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Ireland is like that throughout the whole country, except maybe Dublin. It's worked for them for ages; there's been articles written about wackily-addressed ma
by Grishnakh 11y ago
Ireland is like that throughout the whole country, except maybe Dublin. It's worked for them for ages; there's been articles written about wackily-addressed mail being sent to people in Ireland and arriving to the correct destination. (I remember one that was just a long description going something like "the lad who...").
The problem is if someone in Ireland tries to order something from a company in another country, where the computer system isn't set up to handle totally arbitrary addresses.
Even UK addresses look pretty anarchic to someone in America, where every address has a street name, a house number, a city, a state, and a zip code. UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number.
If you design your address-storage system to just handle two arbitrarily-long "street" lines, plus a city and postal code, that should handle everything in the UK. For Ireland, just don't require a postal code. The problem is when programmers try to place restrictions on the address to ensure it has "correct formatting". Don't do that; if you need to verify the address, there's APIs you can subscribe to in different countries to check address correctness. Doing it yourself is how these problems happen.
- Symbiote 11y ago> UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number. Royal Mail don't recommend these long addresses; there's a form on their website to produce a canonical address, something like [Building name] [Number] Street [Hamlet/village/town] TOWN PO57 C0DE However, good luck telling anyone who's proud of their tiny hamlet this... http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode (and the "Read our PAF Code of Practice (PDF)" link).
- beejiu 11y agoThe fact that addresses don't come in canonical form is an interesting challenge for anybody who wants to verify addresses, e.g. for fraud preventing. Actually, many banks, when verifying addresses for online transactions, just strip out all non-numeric characters when doing address verification.
- takno 11y agoMy apartment has two different apartment numbers, the right one and the one that Royal Mail made up for their database. Makes it interesting to match things up on different accounts
- DrJokepu 11y agoAlso, a lot of websites have this thing where you have to enter your postal code and then you can pick your address from a list of addresses associated with the postal code. I used to live in a development for a while that was so new that it didn't appear in many of these databases, so signing up for various services (or even paying council tax) was near impossible.
- phillc73 11y agoI had a similar, derived issue. A new house I was renting was marketed as "24 Street Name",the lease document was written as such and the front door had a number 24 on it. However, after moving in, we discovered that on all official databases it was "24-26 Street Name". This caused a number of frustrations over the years. After a while we just put "24-26" on everything and be done with it.
- twic 11y ago> if you need to verify the address, there's APIs you can subscribe to in different countries to check address correctness If you do this, just bear in mind that the APIs aren't always correct, either. While working on a project that used data from the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File recently, we found a couple of people on the team whose addresses weren't in it. And then there's my friend whose flat has an address, but where that address has been stolen by a neighbour with a more prominent front door, effectively leaving my friend addressless.