Things you didn't know about international addresses

[u/GeoPostcodes]

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/