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

> Anybody who has tried to verify addresses

Why would one try to "verify" addresses that one knows nothing about?

> because the mailman "just knows"

The mailman does "just know", and the mailman is who the address is for. Web forms I have seen that have tried to "verify" my address have never done so in a way that made the address better for the mailman.

EDIT: I've long thought that web forms should not have separate "street", "street line 2", "number", "apartment", "whatever" fields. Instead they should offer a multi-line input field labeled "this will go straight on the address label, write whatever you like but it's your problem if it doesn't arrive". You'd probably still need separate fields for town/postcode for calculating postage. And of course it wouldn't work because the downstream delivery company would also insist on something it can "verify".

For the US the underlying need for parsing is to determine a definitive location so that taxation, which can vary down to the municipality level, can be computed.

And even then isn’t necessarily enough. A college friend worked at a pizza place that did almost all business by delivery. The store itself actually crossed a city-county border. The cash registers were physically in the back, because that was the county (with lower sales tax). Technically, all money changed hands in the county, not the city.

I would be more suspicious of this story if I hadn’t seen that the registers were, actually, in the back. And they didn’t have a pickup window back there or anything.

> Why would one try to "verify" addresses that one knows nothing about?

So you aren't shipping your product to some place that doesn't exist. Also, some KYC requires that you verify the address of the person.

> So you aren't shipping your product to some place that doesn't exist.

But businesses can't usually verify whether a place exists. The best they can usually do is to verify whether a place has an entry in their database of supposedly all places that supposedly existed at a point in time that is necessarily in the past.

That's not the same thing. Trust me, I would know: I live in a new-ish building, and for at least two years after it was completed and people were living here, some businesses still refused to take my money because they claimed that my address didn't exist. That was neither in their interest nor in mine.

> Also, some KYC requires that you verify the address of the person.

Define "verify". Verify that they provided some address that exists somewhere, possibly unconnected to the person? Worthless. Verify that they can receive mail at said address? OK, but doesn't require you to parse the address, just to print it onto a label and let the post office worry about it.

In the shipping scenario, you can’t really know if it’s a local address or not without talking to someone with local knowledge.

The FAA even legally accepts “third house down from the barn” in some instances.

The KYC scenario is different, and a PITA for people like me, because I spent half my life without a physical mailing address (we picked it up at the post office).

The real world is messy, and u feel like SV and finance have done a lot of hand waving to ignore this.