Parsing a United States Location String with PHP
So I needed a way to parse/extract a location string into the city and state or zip code for a client’s site. If you don’t quite know what I’m talking about, head over to Superpages and look at the location field. A couple Google searches later, I decided to just go ahead an write my own function. This sounds easy until you think about it. Any of the following inputs need to be able to be parsed.
- dallas tx
- dallas, texas
- los angeles california
- washington disctrict of columbia
- richmond virginia
- charleston west virginia
- 90001
This is beyond the scope of a simple regular expression. We can’t simply use the last word of the input either since the state could be multiple words like in case #4. There’s no way to determine which word or group of words is the state without testing the string against an array of states. As you can see, cases like #5 and #6 complicate things even further because if we test from the end of the string, virginia could also be west virginia
Here is the function I came up with. Please let me know if you find a bug or condition that cannot be parsed. Read the rest of this entry »
