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Agreed. A former employer tried to implement something of the sort, just to keep the city names nice... They ended up giving up on it because the data just wa

Agreed. A former employer tried to implement something of the sort, just to keep the city names nice... They ended up giving up on it because the data just wasn't good enough. They even tried just for the US, and not international, and it still wasn't good enough. It just changes too much and any inconvenience to the customer was not acceptable.

tmcneal 15y ago
There's third-party vendors that provide an API to verify address information. QAS is one of that's used by some large retail sites: http://www.qas.com/ http://www.qas.com/
- ars 15y ago
  You don't need a third party: https://www.usps.com/webtools/htm/Address-Information-v3-1a.htm https://www.usps.com/webtools/htm/Address-Information-v3-1a....
  - nicw 15y ago
    Woah, thanks. I didn't know the USPS provided this API
ianferrel 15y ago
It seems like the right way to do this is to have a positive list, but to accept anything. If you put in a city on the list, then you get the green SUCCESS (and probably some autocomplete suggestions to take you there), if you put in one that's not on the list, you get an no cue at all (or an equivocal one) Then as you make successful orders to previously unknown cities, you can add them to the known list (possibly as aliases of the "real" city name, which you can then display as a choice to future users on entry.
- aquark 15y ago
  The list of valid cities in the US is likely huge -- having an auto complete list that matched anything would likely make it harder as the users has to scroll past a lot of close but not the right ones. Populating the auto-complete list with the 100 biggest cities and accepting any input would probably give a better compromise. Or why not just ask for zip code first and auto-populate the rest?
  - wccrawford 15y ago
    http://www.greatdata.com/zip-code-questions.htm http://www.greatdata.com/zip-code-questions.htm Q: How often do the ZIP / postal codes really change? A: U.S. ZIP Codes change sporadically. Most of the time there's just a few changes, but every now and then (especially around July 1st) there will be major changes. ---- ... In other words, they change all the bloody time.

tmcneal 15y ago

There's third-party vendors that provide an API to verify address information. QAS is one of that's used by some large retail sites: http://www.qas.com/ http://www.qas.com/

ars 15y ago
You don't need a third party: https://www.usps.com/webtools/htm/Address-Information-v3-1a.htm https://www.usps.com/webtools/htm/Address-Information-v3-1a....
- nicw 15y ago
  Woah, thanks. I didn't know the USPS provided this API

ianferrel 15y ago

It seems like the right way to do this is to have a positive list, but to accept anything. If you put in a city on the list, then you get the green SUCCESS (and probably some autocomplete suggestions to take you there), if you put in one that's not on the list, you get an no cue at all (or an equivocal one) Then as you make successful orders to previously unknown cities, you can add them to the known list (possibly as aliases of the "real" city name, which you can then display as a choice to future users on entry.

aquark 15y ago
The list of valid cities in the US is likely huge -- having an auto complete list that matched anything would likely make it harder as the users has to scroll past a lot of close but not the right ones. Populating the auto-complete list with the 100 biggest cities and accepting any input would probably give a better compromise. Or why not just ask for zip code first and auto-populate the rest?
- wccrawford 15y ago
  http://www.greatdata.com/zip-code-questions.htm http://www.greatdata.com/zip-code-questions.htm Q: How often do the ZIP / postal codes really change? A: U.S. ZIP Codes change sporadically. Most of the time there's just a few changes, but every now and then (especially around July 1st) there will be major changes. ---- ... In other words, they change all the bloody time.