Changelog 2022

In countries like Switzerland and Austria, entering a P.O. Box number is sometimes optional. In Germany, however, the entry is required. To better differentiate here, we separate the entered information into Keyword and Number.

Example: PoBox-Input without Keyword

Example: PoBox-Input with Keyword

Fuzzy search can be used only in SingleLine Autocompletion to get a list of results based on likely relevance even though search words may be not exactly match. The fuzzy feature must be activated by the include option fuzzy-search in the request.

The Single-Line Autocompletion also takes into account other postal codes of the same municipality. The fuzzy feature must be activated by the include option fuzzy-search in the request.

The field addressLine is used to enter the street name and house number or the poBox in one field instead of using different fields.

Some street names contain numbers that can be written together or separately from the name. Now we are allowing more flexibility in the way how the names can be written. Also, house numbers are now better recognized. For example:

The position and length of the Po Box number within the user input is very important and decides whether the entered number is interpreted as PoBox number or as postalCode. If the number entered after the word Postfach (or its synonym) and its length is not equal to the length of postalCode, the number would be interpreted as PoBox number, otherwise it would be interpreted as postalCode. The number would be interpreted as postalCode, if it is entered after the word Postfach (or its synonym) followed by whitespace and its length is equal to the length of postalCode.

The Api parameters coordinates-wgs84-point and coordinates-wgs84-calculated to get Geo coordinates for an address have been replaced by the parameter coordinates-wgs84 and Api-Clients must use the last one.

Detection of locality has been optimized to find the best address even by incomplete or incorrect user input.

Example: Incomplete input of locality

Example: Incorrect input of locality

A special thing about enclaves is that they can be addressed with two different country codes and two different postal codes. This has lead to inconsistent information of country code, country info and postal code.

With the improved handling, country code and postal codes are always returned in a consistent way. Furthermore, the include option "country-info" (which returns ISO3166-1 codes) will always be aligned to the territorial country where the enclave belongs to.

Example: Uniform input of country and postal code (both DE)

Example: Uniform input of country and postal code (both AT)

Example: Mixed input of country (DE) and postal code (AT)

Example: Mixed input of country (AT) and postal code (DE)

It is not always clear to users if the commonly used name of a locality is really the official name of that locality, or if it is actually the name of the municipality or sub-locality. Therefore it happens that users enter a sub-locality name or a municipality name into the locality-field. If the user-input has no further mistakes, it will be corrected and still lead to a good validation-result.

Example: Input of a sub-locality in the locality field

Example: Input of a municipality in the locality field

Return Normalized status for cases when user input differs only in spaces or other special characters

Example: Street names with separators-only difference

Postal codes in the input which are not complete will return reasonable results.

Example: Incomplete postal code

Even complex house number/street combinations in the address line will be addigned correctly

Example: Street name has number as well

Example: Street name has number, no house number given

Example: Street with several numbers, and misplaced house number