Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

General Questions

Q: Is there a different API for each country?
A: All countries can be accessed through the same API. This is what makes AddressDoctor so unique. Simply learn one interface and process data from the entire world.

Q: How does AddressDoctor correct an address?
A: The process of address validation can be divided into two actions:
Identifying the address element and comparing the data against reference tables.

In the first step, AddressDoctor tries to identify address elements and assigns them to the correct fields.
The identified address elements which are truncated or shortened will be changed to the proper form before the comparison takes place.

Address validation is the second step, in which the prestructured address data is compared against reference tables supplied by postal organizations.
All relevant data will be used in this matching process. This differs from country to country, because some countries need address parts that are not existing or not relevant in other countries (e.g. post codes or province names), and the detail level supplied for this country. Some countries supply house number or building information, while others only give post codes for town parts. If all relevant input address parts create a single match, the address will be selected as result. This match does not need to be a complete match for all address parts - it can be a partial match for some.
If some of the components create a no match, AddressDoctor will check the addresses that created a match on the most address parts and will try to selected the best of these addresses as the result. In many cases it is not possible to fully validate an address, because the matching will end in multi match or no match situation, where many address parts did or did not create a partial match. In these cases, AddressDoctor has a unique deliverability assessment feature that classifies addresses according to their probable deliverability.

Q: Does AddressDoctor parse out street directionals or street designators?
A: No, AddressDoctor does not parse out street directionals or street designators. They remain part of the street field.

Q: Is AddressDoctor able to guess the right country?
A: Even though our engine has some built-in features to detect a country, it will not always succeed in doing this and in some cases the country recognition may even fail. The only way to prevent this to always supply country information in a separate country field.

Q: How can I determine if a postal code is valid for a country?
A: Use the FastCompletion mode of the Web Service or of the Enterprise Engine and pass the postal code as well as the country. You may then check the ElementMatchStatus value for the postal code (first position) to determine if the postal code exists in that country. If the code exists the first position of the ElementMatchStatus will contain a value of 4.

Q: How does AddressDoctor standardize / correct my data?
A: For every country you have licenced AddressDoctor uses a reference database. This database contains all information like zip/ postcodes, locality names, street names, synonyms, PO boxes etc. of the specific country. During the processing AddressDoctor compares every addresselement of the inputfile with the correct data in the reference database.

Q: How are PO box designators returned from AddressDoctor?
A: The PO box designator is standardised according to the postal rules of the specific country. An individual format isn't available at the moment.

Q: Which charater sets does AddressDoctor support?
A: AddressDoctor supports the following character sets:

• UTF-32 Big Endian Unicode
• UTF-32 Little Endian Unicode
• UTF-16 Big Endian Unicode
• UTF-16 Little Endian Unicode
• UTF-8 Unicode
• UCS-4 Big Endian Unicode
• UCS-4 Little Endian Unicode
• UCS-2 Big Endian Unicode
• UCS-2 Little Endian Unicode
• ISO 8859-1 (Latin_1 - Western Europe)
• ISO 8859-2 (Latin_2 - Eastern Europe)
• ISO 8859-3 (Latin_3 - Southeastern Europe)
• ISO 8859-4 (Latin_4 - Scandinavia/Baltic)
• ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic - Russia, Ukraine)
• ISO 8859-6 (Arabic)
• ISO 8859-7 (Greek)
• ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew)
• ISO 8859-9 (Latin_5 - Turkey)
• ISO 8859-10 (Latin_6 - Nordic)
• ISO 8859-15
• IBM 437 (US)
• IBM 850 (Multilingual Latin I)
• IBM 851 (Latin II)
• IBM 855 (Cyrillic)
• IBM 857 (Turkish)
• IBM 862 (Hebrew)
• WIN 1250 (Central Europe - Windows code page)
• WIN 1251 (Cyrillic - Windows code page)
• WIN 1252 (Latin I - Windows code page)
• WIN 1253 (Greek - Windows code page)
• WIN 1254 (Turkish - Windows code page)
• WIN 1255 (Hebrew - Windows code page)
• WIN 1256 (Arabic - Windows code page)
• WIN 1257 (Baltic - Windows code page)
• Big5 (Traditional Chinese)
• Shift-JIS (Japanese)
• GBK (Simplified Chinese)
• UHC (Korean Unified Hangul)
• ASCII (ISO646-US)
• EBCDIC (IBM standard 037)

Q: Which alphabets does AddressDoctor support?
A: AddressDoctor supports the following alphabets:

• Transliteration of various Latin code page characters ISO 8859-X to Latin (Eastern and Northern European alphabets)
• Greek (BGN/PCGN 1962, ISO 843 – 1997)
• Cyrillic (BGN/PCGN 1947, ISO 9 – 1995)
• Hebrew
• Japanese Kana and Kanji
• Chinese Pinyin for Mandarin and Cantonese
• Korean Hangul

Q: Is the province information returned by AddressDoctor using the ISO standard?
A: Province information (defined as State, Kanton, Prefecture, Province, Bundesland or County depending on the country) is returned as typically used by the postal operator in the respective country. In most cases postal administrations define a complete list of abbreviations to be used for addressing.

Q: I receive bad results when validating my addresses. What can be the reason for this?
A: Unfortunately, it may happen that the result of address cleaning is not satisfactory. The five most common reasons for this are

• Incorrect Field assignment
• Input data is missing too much information
• Necessary fields have not been assigned
• Too many unnecessary fields have been assigned
• Corrupt input data

Q: How does AddressDoctor make sure the system is always available?
A: AddressDoctor employs the most recent technology in order to assure optimal system availability at all times. As a matter of course, the system is checked constantly and hosted on a highly available Cluster.