How to match zipcode for simple address matching regex?

[dschu012]

I am trying to make a regex to match simple addresses like

123 Main Street
Simpleville, VA 12345

I have little experience with regex's and through reading and lots of messing around I have come up with.

/(\d{1,5}).*\b(A[LKSZRAP]|C[AOT]|D[EC]|F[LM]|G[AU]|HI|I[ADLN]|K[SY]|LA|M[ADEHINOPST]|N[CDEHJMVY]|O[HKR]|P[ARW]|RI|S[CD]|T[NX]|UT|V[AIT]|W[AIVY])\b/gm

While this can get many false positives it seems to work well enough in most cases since the state abbreviation has to be uppercase. The problem I am having it matching the zipcode too. What I did was attach \d{5}? to the end of that regex but that just caused the whole regex to fail. Shouldn't the ? mean that it will optionally match 5 digits if it sees them? Thanks.

[Oralloy]

dschu012,

I don't see anything in your pattern looking for a zip code.

Perhaps try adding something like this bit at the end of your pattern:

 *[0-9]{5,5}(-[0-9]{4,4})?

Which is to say:

1. one or more spaces
2. followed by five digits
3. optionally followed by a hyphen and four additional digits

Sorry if I'm a little old-school, I don't know all your requirements. If you look on CPAN, there are some really good (Perl) patterns for recognizing all sorts of things.

For example, Geo::StreetAddr ess::US.

Cheers!
Oralloy

[dschu012]

Thanks. I got what I needed by adding

(\s+\d{5})?

to the end. Previously I had the ? inside the parenthesis with was causing the regex to come back with nothing if there were no spaces after the state.

[Oralloy]

Yep, much more concise.

So you don't have to deal with nine-digit zip codes, then?