addresses

The challenge:

Street addresses are difficult. I specifically deal with Australian postal addresses, and one would expect most come in some form similar to 16 Fictional Street, Suburban Town, right? But no. There is no law forcing people to conform to norm. Go open Google maps and type The Horizon, Epping, Victoria. Yes, this is not a street. This is The Horizon!

Now to further complicate matters, let's say we have to find an address on the horizon that is embedded in free text. Now we have a problem, right?

The solution:

This is my attempt at one. I'm building a library based on Haskell parser combinators to

1. Parse the common cases of Australian postal addresses out of streams of unrelated text.

2. The output should be Haskell Types, but in a format that can be easily transformed for validation against the comprehensive list of Australian Addresses (G-NAF).

3. Correctly parse abbreviations (12 St Paul St).

4. Will do the right thing when presented with ranges of numbers (12-30 Fictional Street), multiple addresses within one chunk of text, or even multiple addresses within a street (12, 15, 20-30 Fictional Street).

The current state:

I'm not there yet. This is my initial attempt. Be aware that I'm a beginner Haskeller, so this implementation is a reflection of my current skills.

On Nix

• run nix-shell to get a nix environment. The workflow used to create default.nix and addresses.nix was:

  $ cabal2nix ./ > addresses.nix
  $ cabal2nix ./ --shell > default.nix

  Then in default.nix replace the function call f with import ./addresses.nix; also optionally add development dependencies such a local hoogle server and ghcid.

• run hoogle server --local and point your browser to localhost:8080. You get hoogle to work offline for documentation on the packages used in this project!

• run ghcid -c cabal new-repl to run ghcid without stack.