Regular expression for address field validation

Question

I am trying to write a regular expression that facilitates an address, example 21-big walk way or 21 St.Elizabeth's drive I came up with the following regular expression but I am not too keen to how to incorporate all the characters (alphanumeric, space dash, full stop, apostrophe)

"regexp=^[A-Za-z-0-99999999'

Answer 1

In case if you don't have a fixed format for the address as mentioned above, I would use regex expression just to eliminate the symbols which are not used in the address (like specialized sybmols - &(%#$^). Result would be:

[A-Za-z0-9'\.\-\s\,]

Answer 2

Regular expression for simple address validation

^[#.0-9a-zA-Z\s,-]+$

E.g. for Address match case

#1, North Street, Chennai - 11 

E.g. for Address not match case

$1, North Street, Chennai @ 11

Answer 3

Just to add to Serzas' answer(since don't have enough reps. to comment). alphabets and numbers can effectively be replaced by \w for words. Additionally apostrophe,comma,period and hyphen doesn't necessarily need a backslash. My requirement also involved front and back slashes so \/ and finally whitespaces with \s. The working regex for me ,as such was :

pattern: "[\w',-\\/.\s]"

Answer 4

This one worked for me:

\d+[ ](?:[A-Za-z0-9.-]+[ ]?)+(?:Avenue|Lane|Road|Boulevard|Drive|Street|Ave|Dr|Rd|Blvd|Ln|St)\.?

The source: https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/989012/Validate-and-Find-Addresses-with-RegEx

Answer 5

I have succesfully used ;

Dim regexString = New stringbuilder
    With regexString
       .Append("(?<h>^[\d]+[ ])(?<s>.+$)|")                'find the 2013 1st ambonstreet 
       .Append("(?<s>^.*?)(?<h>[ ][\d]+[ ])(?<e>[\D]+$)|") 'find the 1-7-4 Dual Ampstreet 130 A
       .Append("(?<s>^[\D]+[ ])(?<h>[\d]+)(?<e>.*?$)|")    'find the Terheydenlaan 320 B3 
       .Append("(?<s>^.*?)(?<h>\d*?$)")                    'find the 245e oosterkade 9
    End With

    Dim Address As Match = Regex.Match(DataRow("customerAddressLine1"), regexString.ToString(), RegexOptions.Multiline)

    If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(Address.Groups("s").Value) Then StreetName = Address.Groups("s").Value
    If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(Address.Groups("h").Value) Then HouseNumber = Address.Groups("h").Value
    If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(Address.Groups("e").Value) Then Extension = Address.Groups("e").Value

The regex will attempt to find a result, if there is none, it move to the next alternative. If no result is found, none of the 4 formats where present.

Answer 6

Regex is a very bad choice for this kind of task. Try to find a web service or an address database or a product which can clean address data instead.

Related:

• Address validation using Google Maps API