NAME Data::Address::Standardize - Standardize U.S. postal addresses. SYNOPSIS use Data::Address::Standardize; ($street, $city, $state, $zip) = std_addr($street, $city, $state, $zip); or, use Data::Address::Standardize; # Read in a pipe-delimited data set like a filter. while(<>) { chomp; my @addr = split('\|'); push @addr_list, [ @addr ]; } my @std_list = std_addrs(@addr_list); # Write a pipe-delimited data set to standard output. foreach (@std_list) { print join('|', @$_), "\n"; } DESCRIPTION The United States Postal Service (USPS) has on its web site an HTML form at `http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/lookups/lookup_zip+4.html' for standardizing an address. Given a firm, urbanization, street address, city, state, and zip, it will put the address into standard form (provided the address is in their database) and display a page with the resulting address. This Perl module provides a programmatic interface to this service, so you can write a program to process your entire personal address book without having to manually type them all in to the form. Because the USPS could change or remove this functionality at any time, be prepared for the possibility that this code may fail to function. In fact, as of this version, there is no error checking in place, so if they do change things, this code will most likely fail in a noisy way. If you discover that the service has changed, please email the author your findings. If an error occurs in trying to standardize the address, then no array will be returned. Otherwise, a four-element array will be returned. To see debugging output, set $Data::Address::Standardize::verbose to a true value. TERMS OF USE BE SURE TO READ AND FOLLOW THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE TERMS OF USE PAGE AT `http://www.usps.gov/disclaimer.html'. IN PARTICULAR, NOTE THAT THEY DO NOT PERMIT THE USE OF THEIR WEB SITE'S FUNCTIONALITY FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES. DO NOT USE THIS CODE IN A WAY THAT VIOLATES THE TERMS OF USE. The author believes that the example usage given above does not violate these terms, but sole responsibility for conforming to the terms of use belongs to the user of this code, not the author. AUTHOR Gregor N. Purdy, `gregor@focusresearch.com'. COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 1999-2000 Gregor N. Purdy. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.