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LocalitiesByName

Finds a list of towns or villages that match the requested name.

Live Demo

This service is hosted in multiple countries. Select your preferred country to see the appropriate endpoint URLs.

Changing the hosting country does not affect the data returned by the service. However you may wish to select a particular country based on your data residency requirements or network latency.
JSON
Open API
SOAP

Description

Finds a list of towns or villages that match the requested name.

Each matching town or village is returned as a PartialAddress, which contains the name of the town or village as the Description and a unique identifier as the ID. The caller can use the Description to select the required town or village, and the corresponding ID can be used as input to the StreetsByLocalityKey or AddressesByLocalityKey methods to further refine the address.

The name can contain multiple parts, separated by commas. For example, if you are looking for a village that is a suburb of a town, you can supply the name as "village, town" to only include that village within that town in the results. If you only supply the village name, you may retrieve many results, each representing a village of the same name within different towns. Equally, if you only supply the town name, you will retrieve the name of every village within that town in addition to the town itself. Up to three such levels are available, e.g. "hamlet, village, town".

The name is also assumed to have a wildcard at the end. For example, "black" will match Blackburn, Blackpool and various others, and all the villages within those areas.

Note that some areas that are known locally may not be recognised by the Royal Mail, and so will not appear in this list. In this case, you should be able to search for and find the major post town that the area is within and use that instead. For example, "Chelsea" does not exist but "London" does, and all the streets and addresses you would expect to be able to find within Chelsea can be found within London.

Credit Usage

Requests to this method do not consume credits, but you must have some AddressCapture credits available.

Parameters

The following parameters can be supplied to this method

username

username

See the available authentication methods. If you are using username & password authentication, specify the username to authenticate as. If you are using API Key authentication and you are not using the JSON, Javascript or ADO APIs, use your API Key here with the prefix apikey-, e.g. apikey-ABCD-1234-EFGH-5678
password

password

If you are using username & password authentication, specify the password to use for authentication. Otherwise leave this blank.
licence

licence

As the Royal Mail PAF database can be licensed in multiple ways, this parameter indicates under which license you are accessing the data. This must match the variant you have a license or credits for - if you are unsure which option to choose, please contact your account manager

name

name

The name of the locality to search for.

Advanced Options

The following options can be specified as part of the option parameter. Each option is specified as a key/value pair. The list of available names is shown below, along with a description of the allowable values for that name.

Common Options
Name Description
ApplicationName

ApplicationName

Gives the name of the calling application - used to break down usage by application in the usage reports on the dashboard

Results

This method returns an object containing the following fields:

Status

Status

Indicates whether the method call was successful, or if some error occurred. If the Success field is true, the other results described below can be used to get the results of the method. If Success is false, some error occurred in calling the method, such as the authentication failed or the account is out of credits. The details of the error can be obtained from the ErrorMessage field, and any other results should be ignored
Results

Results

Contains an array of towns that match the query. Each town is returned with a Description, which contains a partial, human-readable version of the address, and an ID which can be supplied to the StreetsByLocalityKey or AddressesByLocalityKey method to get the list of streets or addresses in the locality respectively

Live Demo

licence
name
options
Name Value
Common Options

Sample Code