[OSM-dev] extracting house-number from string

[openstreetmap-dev at scd.debian.net]

In article <49BBC379.2050908 at remote.org> frederik at remote.org writes:
>Could someone from the US shed some light on this type of address:
>
>5325 E. Pacific Coast Hwy
>Long Beach, CA 90804
>
>The "E." is, to the best of my knowledge, just a designation of which 
>side of the road the building is on; it is neither part of the street 
>name (the street is "Pacific Coast Highway", not "East Pacific Coast 
>Highway"), nor is it a part of the house number (there is no 
>corresponding 5325 A, B, C, D, nor a 5325 W for that matter).

PCH (aka Pacific Coast Highway, aka CA 1) is east/west in Long Beach.
An address on East PCH would be on the east side of the city.  Most
cities try to avoid duplicate addresses on the east/west or
north/south sections of the same street, but not all do.  (In
Portland, OR most streets are NE/SW or NW/SE) Many cities use the
directions from a central intersection, such as Main St and 1st St and
number outwards.  Some will continue numbers from the adjacent city or
using a county standard.  There are cases where the addresses on one
side of the street have no relation to those on the other, being in
different cities.  Of course there are exceptions, such as when cities
merge and keep all the old addresses and duplicate street names.  (San
Pedro, part of Los Angeles, has it's own addressing.)

Some places have North, South, East, or West (or even upper and lower)
suffixes that usually denote a different parallel street.  Sometimes
the parallel street doesn't have a suffix, which can be confusing when
looking for a particular address.  (I know of one such case with only
about 10 feet horizontal separation, but about 100 feet vertical.)

>How do you normally treat the "E." when recording addresses in databases 
>and so on? (Please don't say "we have a middle initial for addresses" ;-)

It should be kept.  Usually by treating in as part of the street name.


-- 
Blars Blarson			blarson at scd.debian.net

With Microsoft, failure is not an option.  It is a standard feature.