At the Apeldoorn sprint today we had several discussions about street parsing and what we should do about it. A couple of solutions came up, I spoke first with Joe Murray and Xavier Dutoit. At that point in time using Extensions per street parsing seemed a logical solution. Discussing a little more with Lobo and Tim Otten the idea changed, and perhaps one Extension for international street parsing should be enough. Let me explain the issue first for all of you out there that are not into street parsing....

We have the option in CiviCRM to activate street parsing. That means that the street address (for example 512 Rodeo Drive) is split up in different fields (street name, street number, appt/building). So far so good....the issue is that different countries use different sequences to make addresses. In my country for example an address is made up of street name, street number, appt/building, postal code and city. So Ambachstraat 21, 6971 BN Brummen is a valid address. In other countries an address means street number, appt/building, street name, city, county, postal code. So in this system 52 Cheviot Close, Camberley, Surrey, GU13 SW4 is a valid address.

The current functionality in CiviCRM supports the street parsing with the US format, and some of us (I for one for the Dutch way) have modified this at a specific project to make it behave according to local standards.

The aim would be to have the possibility to use different ways of street parsing based on the country code of the contact. So I could have a site for a Dutch NGO, with English as the language but have street parsing in the Dutch way for Dutch contacts, in the English way for English contact etc.

Initially we thought we would create an Extension for a country code which could have local street parsing. But actually there are only a number of street parsing options, and each of those is used in many countries. I can find the following varieties:

1. {street number}{ }{appt}{ }{street name}<next line>{city}{, }{county}{, }{state}{ }{postal code}
2. {street number}{, }{appt}{, }{street name}<next line>{city}{, }{county}{, }{state}{ }{postal code}
3. {street name}{ }{street number}{ }{appt}<next line>{postal code}{ }{city}
4. {street name}{, }{street number}{ }{appt}<next line>{postal code}{ }{city}
5. {street number}{ }{appt}{ }{street name}<next line>{postal code}{ }{city}
6. {street number}{, }{appt}{, }{street name}<next line>{postal code}{ }{city}

First of all I would like to know if you know of any other sequences of street parsing?

My line of thinking is now that we develop an extension that caters for these six ways of street parsing, with the first one as default for all countries. We then have a setting that allows the user to change the street parsing for a country, with the five other ways as options. Does that make sense? Would love to hear from you all!