On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 09:47, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > 5325 E. Pacific Coast Hwy > Long Beach, CA 90804
Short parsing of what it is: Building number: 5325 Street name: E Pacific Coast Hwy City: Long Beach State: CA Postcode: 90804 You are correct that the "E" references east, but it's not the east side of the street. It's part street name (and will be found there in the OSM data), part address. Essentially, US cities are numbered on a Cartesian grid, with its origin in the center of the city. So "5325 East Pacific Coast Highway" indicates that this address is to the east of where Pacific Coast Highway crosses the dividing line. (That the address iseast of the dividing line also implies that Pacific Coast Highway is an east-west road.) Side of the street is indicated by whether a number is even or odd. So, 5325 East is nearby to 5300 but on the opposite side of the street. Both are quite a long way (probably several miles) from 5300 West. >From a programming standpoint, I'll give you some tips on US addresses: - The United States Postal Service is generally accepted as the arbiter of address formatting in the USA, and they mandate that pretty much everything that can be abbreviated is abbreviated, so the TIGER data (and most OSM mappers I'm aware of) do the same. The list of abbreviations is here: http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/usps_abbreviations.html#suffix - Directions can come before the "main" name (S 1st Street), after (Pennsylvania Avenue NW), or on both sides (W Loop 410 N). The TIGER data in the US is not very good at getting them in the right position. - "Suffixes" (Street, Lane, Way, Boulevard, etc.) are frequently dropped when giving addresses informally. - Building number always comes before street name, followed by city, state, and ZIP code (postcode,) in that order. -- David J. Lynch [email protected] _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
