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Comment by epcoa | Hacker News Reader

The thing is though that payment networks do in fact do instant verification and it is interesting what gets verified and when. At gas stations it is very common to ask for a zip code (again US), and this is verified immediately to allow the transaction to proceed. I’ve found that when a street address is asked for there is some verification and often a match on the house number is sufficient. Zip codes are verified almost always, names pretty much never. This likely has something to do with complexities behind “authorized users”.

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Funny thing about house numbers: they have their own validation problems. For a while I lived in a building whose house number was of the form 123½ and that was an ongoing source of problems. If it just truncated the ½ that was basically fine (the house at 123 didn't have apartment numbers and the postal workers would deliver it correctly) but validating in online forms (twenty-ish years ago) was a challenge. If they ran any validation at all they'd reject the ½, but it was a crapshoot whether which of "123-1/2" or "123 1/2" would work, or sometimes neither one. The USPS's official recommendation at the time was to enter it as "123 1 2 N Streetname" which usually validated but looked so odd it was my last choice (and some validators rejected the "three numbers" format too).

I don't think I ever tried "123.5", actually.

Around here, there used to be addresses like "0100 SW Whatever Ave" that were distinct from "100 SW Whatever Ave". And we've still got various places that have, for example, "NW 21st Avenue" and "NW 21st Place" as a simple workaround for a not-entirely-regular street grid optimized for foot navigation.

123 + 0.5?

At American gas stations, if you have a Canadian credit card, you type in 00000 because Canadians don't have ZIP codes.

Are we sure they don't actually validate against a more generic postal code field? Then again some countries have letters in their postcodes (the UK comes to mind), so that might be a problem anyways.

Canada has letters in postal codes. That’s the issue the GP is referring to, since US gas stations invariably just have a simple 5 numeric digit input for “zip” code.

There is so many ways to write your address I always assume it it’s just the house number as well. In fact I vaguely remember that being a specific field when interacting with some old payment gateway.

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