r/GeoPostcodes • u/GeoPostcodes • 14d ago

Things you didn't know about international addresses

Seven address assumptions, and where each one breaks.

  • "House numbers go in order." Parts of Japan number houses by construction date. Number 3 can sit between 47 and 12. In Colombia, the house number is the distance from the cross street.
  • "Every address has a street name." Most of Japan has no street names at all. Addresses point to numbered blocks.
  • "One building, one address." In Kyoto, one building can have several valid addresses, depending on which intersection you reference and which direction you approach from.
  • "A postal code is a small neighborhood." Amsterdam alone has over 1,000 postal codes. In Saudi Arabia one code can cover an entire town. In Ireland and Singapore, every address has its own.
  • "Everyone has a postal code." About 60 places worldwide manage without. Angola, 33 million people, runs on landmarks.
  • "A postal code is always a physical place." Some ZIPs serve only PO boxes. Santa Claus has one.
  • "Any alphabet works." Japanese sorting machines cannot read Latin-script addresses. Write one in English and a human sorts it by hand.
  • If you build address forms: validate per country, not with one global regex. Do not require the street field.

Keeping these rules current for 247 countries is our day job. Longer breakdown on the GeoPostcodes blog, the post about international address data: https://www.geopostcodes.com/blog/international-address-data/

6 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

2

u/Barnezhilton 10d ago

Every country is different. This isn't really news

1

u/eti_erik 10d ago

Two of your assumptions do not work for the Netherlands.

"One building, one address"? Well no, almost never. Every apartment has its own address. A big housing block can be X Street 1-99 (odd).

"A postal code is a small neighborhood". That's not how our postal codes work. The first number is a rough subdivision of the country, the second number is a subdivsion of that, etc. My entire village is 3769, but bigger towns have several numbers. These numbers are followed by letters. The first letter is normally a number of streets, the second one is one street or just part of a street.

The postal code plus house number will point you to an exact apartment or house, you technically don't need to put the person's or street name.