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Comment by kpanghmc | Hacker News Reader

There are several legitimate reasons for requiring users to enter in their address in separate fields. The two main ones are:

1. If you need to integrate with third party systems who require you to break up the address. In case you've never tried, parsing addresses is very hard -- if not impossible -- depending on how many formats you need to support. All it takes is one third party library that requires you to break them up to make your life miserable.

2. If you need to categorize your users by country, state, zip, etc. For example, if you need to handle different tax laws for different states or if you need to generate reports on how many users you have from country XYZ.

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Are there any promising open source libraries to fill this niche? Or startups offering it as a service API?

Honestly this seems like a problem that could be solved once and we all would benefit... And like any good problem, there is probably a profit to be made from it.

It seems like it would make it that much easier if it were a text box and a country selection (rather than just a text area, so you can reliably know the country). Since most countries that I'm familiar with have a limited number of ways of representing an address. The larger variation seems to be between address formats of different countries.

Is parsing the addresses on the back end harder than providing the same number of support formats on the front end?

Parsing on the backend, even when only considering United States addresses is incredibly difficult and error prone. There are apartment numbers, rural routes, PO boxes, circles, streets named after compass directions (i.e. North, South, East, West), streets whose direction names appear before or after the street itself (e.g. N. Main St. vs Main St. N.), military addresses, and the list goes on and on.

It's a terrible system really, and the only solution that I've been able to rely upon is having the user parse their own address and supply it to me. At least that way I don't have to spend hours looking through regex statements and edge case detection logic to figure out why a street address was parsed in a particular way.

For the US, the USPS can help you with some of that.

Yes, but they make good money licensing those databases for managed use to nice companies like:

http://www.semaphorecorp.com/

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