Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 7, Names and Places

#81 Clean Up U.S. Addresses

HACK

regular expressions of course! They are ideal for such clean-up operations as

normalizing street types/prefixes/suffixes, dropping extraneous intra-build-

ing indicators, and excising the general detritus of human input.

The Code

The following Perl code was used by Fundrace to clean up each street

address so that it could be successfully geocoded

[Hack #79]. This allowed us to

use the spatial data in thousands and thousands of additional records to

make political money maps. Mostly composed of a series of regular expres-

sions that expand odd abbreviations, it was written with New York City

street-naming idiosyncrasies in mind, but a selection from it should work

anywhere in the U.S:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $addr = shift;

print cleanAddr($addr);

#for turning numerical spellings into digits

our $spelled_nums = {

first => '1st',

second => '2nd',

third => '3rd',

fourth => '4th',

fifth => '5th',

sixth => '6th',

seventh => '7th',

eigth => '8th',

nineth => '9th',

tenth => '10th',

eleventh => '11th',

twelfth => '12th',

thiteenth => '13th',

fourteenth => '14th',

fifteenth => '15th',

sixteenth => '16th',

seventeenth => '17th',

eighteenth => '18th',

nineteenth => '19th',

one => 1,

two => 2,

three => 3,

four => 4,

five => 5,

six => 6,

seven => 7,

eight => 8,

nine => 9,

ten => 10,

};

Clean Up U.S. Addresses #81

Chapter 7, Names and Places ...