Australian Address Verification

[LDriver]

Building a website and want to know how I can verify that addresses both data-entried and searched for are valid.  It's for Australian addresses only at this stage.  Any tips? I'm new at this so simple language please. 

 

[Christian F.]

First of all: Welcome to PHPfreaks.

 

Secondly, as for your tip. If I were to give two tips, they'd have to be:

• Make sure you read the rules, and follow them.
• Post your requests for help in the correct section. People tend to offer more (accurate) help if you do.

[AyKay47]

My first thoughts are to build a function that validates Australian addresses and pass any necessary data to that function.

Perhaps if you show us the relevant code along with your attempt at it, we can help you further.

[Psycho]

My first question would be "What do you consider a valid vs. invalid address"? That is a very significant question.

 

Are you only wanting to verify the FORMAT of the address is valid or are you wanting to know if the address is an ACTUAL physical address?

 

The former requires you to create logic to test for specific patterns and values. The problem here is that it will never be 100% perfect. In fact, with the sheer variability of possible values it will be hard to get anything relatively accurate. That means you will either have to build the logic to be overly strict and have false negatives (incorrectly find valid addresses to be invalid) or build the logic to be too loose and have false positives (find invalid addresses to be valid). But, you will probably fall somewhere in the middle and have both false positives and false negatives.

 

Now, if you mean to do the latter - verify the address is an actual address. Then, you will need to purchase/link to a database of all known valid addresses. You typically have to pay for such things - if they are any good. But, the problem with that is that addresses are always changing. So, the database will never be 100% accurate either.

[Datablue]

I believe what you would be looking for is an API from a reputable Australian address verification vendor. There are several of these and you can find them listed on the Australia Post Website by doing a search for AMAS.

The advantage is using one of these vendors is that they take care of all the matching logic and have access to the Australia Post Postal Address File (PAF) which contains almost every deliverable address in Australia. This file is updated regularly. Most will provide both Batch and point of entry address verification. Many now offer usage based licensing models.