Wow, ambitious project. Anybody who has tried to verify addresses can tell you that the staggering number of different formats and conventions around the world make it and almost intractable problem. So many countries have wildly informal standards and people putting down just whatever they want because the mailman "just knows".

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.

Previously:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775099> Libpostal: A C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world - 117 points by polm23 on Dec 29, 2018 (25 comments)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173920> Libpostal: international street address parsing in C trained on OpenStreetMap (mapzen.com) 74 points by riordan on Feb 25, 2016 (7 comments)

There are many useful applications of libpostal, and it's an impressive library, but one I would caution against is for the purpose of address matching, at least as the 'primary' approach.

The problem is the hardest to parse addresses are also often the hardest to match, making the problem somewhat circular. I wrote about this more in a recent blog on address matching: https://www.robinlinacre.com/address_matching/

Relevant? -> "Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" (https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...)

Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301

In the same vein, there is also Google's excellent libphonenumber for parsing, formatting, and validating international phone numbers.

And because I had no idea before I worked on a project where we had to deal with customer data: many companies also use commercial services for address and phone number validation and normalization.