Snail, a plugin for international mailing addresses

Howdy --

I couldn't find any existing libraries to help format international mailing addresses. Turns out it's rather tedious. Not only do different countries have different names for the components of an address, but many countries have different formats for the city line. And then there's Great Britain, er England, er ... yeah.

So I've started work on a plugin called Snail. My dream is that it will grow to encapsulate the rules of international address formatting and basic validation. It's just quite a lot for any one person.

The first release is up on GitHub at http://github.com/cainlevy/snail. If your application has anything to do with addresses, and you think it may need to go international, I hope you'll check it out!

-Lance

Lance,

I commend you on taking this on. This has been a huge pet peeve of
mine over the years, and only very expensive commercial solutions were
available to even do a fraction of the things necessary to manage
mailing addresses.

Have you thought about also creating parsers to help identify what the
address is, and which formatter to use? (like, identify which state/ province and country, then determine the rules around parsing and
formatting)

Also, I find that I often work with addresses that were inputted in
odd ways, and requires me to "scrub" them a lot. There are very
expensive commercial solutions for this, but no good open source
solutions, and especially no Ruby ones. Thought about putting in some
basic scrubbing rules as well (and possibly address verification
services)?

I'll keep an eye on Snail, and help where I can.

-Kevin

Thanks Kevin! Looking forward to the assistance. :slight_smile:

I haven’t thought about scrubbers and parsers. Sounds like a good fit, but I’m not in a position to really know the best approach, nor do I have an application requiring them that I could use for real-world test data.

My first priority with Snail is to make it easy for people to improve the areas that are most important to them. Right now I have a fixed origination country (USA) and no validation rules. I think the next step is to sketch out the validation system and make the origination country configurable, even if it still only supports USA. From there I hope that people will find it easy to add rules for the countries they know best.

-Lance