discussion: housenumber extraction regexen

hey all, I came across this issue when investigating https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses/issues/2070

it seems like most of the regexen (is that the British form of regexes? 😃) don’t support alphanumeric house numbers (eg. 1a) or address ranges (eg. 1-10).

the most common form of regex seems to be ^([0-9]+) which would probably be better off written as something like ^([0-9]+[a-zA-Z]?|[0-9]+-[0-9]+).

as a result the street regi can end up doing unexpected things such as this:

-74.035221,40.7429476,416-18 GRAND ST,416-18 Grand Street,,,,,,,

I can go ahead and fix it for US/NJ but it seems to also affect a bunch of other files.

to match allthethings we could use the following; which should leave the street name unaffected in the case where a house number match was not possible:

"416-18 GRAND ST".match(/^(([0-9]+[a-zA-Z]?|[0-9]+-[0-9]+)\s+)(.*)$/)
["416-18 GRAND ST", "416-18 ", "416-18", "GRAND ST"]

the matches would then always be $2 for housenumber and $3 for street name
note: the ordering would need to be flipped for Germanic addresses

thoughts?

$ find sources -type f -iname "*.json" | xargs grep \"pattern\" | cut -d\" -f4 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r
    376 ^(?:[0-9]+ )(.*)
    311 ^([0-9]+)
     67 ^([0-9]+)( .*)
     49 ^.* ((Unit|Apt) [0-9A-Za-z])$
     16 ^(?:\\S+ )(.*)
     15 ^(\\S+)
      8 ([0-9]*) (.*)
      6 function
      5 ^(?:[0-9]+ )?(.*?),(?: )?(|[^,]+),?(?: )(.*?),(?: )(.*)(?: )([0-9]+)$
      5 ^(?:[0-9]+) (.*)
      3 ([0-9]+)(.*)~(.*), IL ([0-9]+)
... etc

[migurski]

Maybe this is an opportunity for a new function in the core tag set that’s a pre-baked, reliable regex for street numbers?

[migurski]

Thanks @trescube! Thanks for your good work on the new functions!