←back to thread

Libpostal: C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world

(github.com)
77 points nateb2022 | 1 comments | 09 Jul 25 01:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.194s | source
Show context
Ameo ◴[09 Jul 25 05:48 UTC] No.44506687[source]▶
I used this at a previous company with quite good success.

With relatively minimal effort, I was able to spin up a little standalone container that wrapped around the service and exposed a basic API to parse a raw address string and return it as structured data.

Address parsing is definitely an extremely complex problem space with practically infinite edge cases, but libpostal does just about as well as I could expect it to.

replies(2): >>44506724 #>>44508483 #
1. ethan_smith ◴[09 Jul 25 11:00 UTC] No.44508483[source]▶
Worth noting that libpostal requires ~2GB RAM when fully loaded due to its comprehensive data models. For containerized deployments, we reduced memory usage by ~70% by compiling with only the specific country models needed for our use case.