this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Made that joke in an interview once.
They didn't think it was funny. They truly thought Regex was the solution to, but never the cause of, all problems.
They wanted to make a Regex to verify every single address in the world. Dodged a bullet
Holy hell yeah you did. How would you go about doing that in a single expression? A bunch of back references to figure out the country? What if that's not included? Oy.
You wouldn't. It's not possible. Which is what I told them.
And why would you want to? Legally if you change the given address, and it fails to get delivered - that is on you. Not them.
Some countries have addresses that are literally 'Last house on the left by the Big Tree. Bumban(Neighborhood). NN (Country)'. Any US Centric validation would fail this but I assure you - mail gets delivered just fine.
The only valid regex is
(.+). Maybe add a separate country field (especially because some Americans wholeheartedly believe that the entire world should understand that "foobar, TX" means "foobar, Texas, United States") (don't get me started on states whose abbreviations are also ISO country codes).Unfortunately I guess business people only care about getting fewer support calls for missing shipping details, not correctness or a couple of calls from customers who live in the boonies. Then the proper answer is a form with a bunch of fields... which Americans will inevitably fuck up by making the "State" field mandatory despite most countries not having an equivalent.
What I'd really do is use one of those services that automatically fill on the address using google maps or whatever. Not perfect, probably not free, but a whole lot less work for presumably way fewer PEBCAKs from customers.
If you're using one of those services then PLEASE allow manual entry / override because I've had forms like that which I were blocked from filing in because it didn't acknowledge that my address existed.
/.+(road|street).+/ resigns