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CleanAddress

Cleanse a residential address

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

Formats, verifies and corrects a given address into a full address.

Non-UK addresses are also handled and produce a MatchLevel in the result of NOK_Foreign. See the options below to control how international addresses are handled.

Credit Usage

Each request to this method consumes 1 Postcoder credit.

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.
address

address

The address to clean. The best results will be obtained when individual parts of the address are supplied on separate lines or separated within a line by commas, but the service will make best attempts to match data supplied in any format.

options

options

An array of options that control further details of how this method operates. See the Advanced Options section below for more information.

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
Address Formatting Options
There are a large number of options to control how the raw address details are combined & formatted for presentation. They are described in more detail with live interactive examples on the address formatting reference. A summary of the available options is also listed below.
Name Description
Formatter

Formatter

Pick from one of the available formatters to control how the raw address is converted into a human-readable address:
  • DefaultFormatter
  • PAFStandardFormatter
  • NoOrganisationFormatter
MaxLines

MaxLines

The number of lines to format the address over. An additional line will be included at the end of the results for the postcode
MaxLineLength

MaxLineLength

The maximum number of characters that can appear in each address line
FixTownCounty

FixTownCounty

true to ensure that the town and county are returned in the last two address lines, or false if they should appear in the first available line
FixBuilding

FixBuilding

Ensures the building name/number is always placed in the first line
NormalizeCase

NormalizeCase

Converts all text in the address except the town name to proper case
NormalizeTownCase

NormalizeTownCase

Converts the town name to proper case
UseAnyAvailableCounty

UseAnyAvailableCounty

Uses any available county to populate the formatted address, not just the postal county
ExcludeCounty

ExcludeCounty

Excludes the county, if any, from the formatted address
UnwantedPunctuation

UnwantedPunctuation

A string containing any punctuation characters to be removed from the formatted address
Geocoding Options
Note: Geocoding information is not available for all addresses. Some addresses (e.g. PO Boxes) do not represent a physical location, while for some countries (including Isle of Man and Channel Islands) the data is not currently available. The information requested by these options will be returned wherever possible, but is not guaranteed for all addresses.
Name Description
IncludeLocation

IncludeLocation

Includes location information (latitude/longitude, easting/northing and/or grid reference, depending on country) where possible
IncludeConstituency

IncludeConstituency

Includes the UK parliamentary constituency the address is in where possible
IncludeCountry

IncludeCountry

Include the ISO 2-character code and full name of the country
IncludeAdminArea

IncludeAdminArea

Includes names & codes for the administrative areas the address is in where possible. For UK addresses this can include:
  • County
  • CountyCode
  • District
  • DistrictCode
  • Ward
  • WardCode
  • Country

For UK addresses, this option sets the Country field to the name of the nation within the UK, i.e. "England", "Scotland", "Wales" or "Northern Ireland". This overrides the IncludeCountry option that would otherwise set it to "United Kingdom"

For US addresses the County, CountyCode and District fields can be populated.

Address Unique Reference Options
Note: Only one unique identifier for each address will be returned. An error will be returned if you set more than one of these options to true.
Name Description
IncludeUDPRN

IncludeUDPRN

Set to true to include the UDPRN for UK addresses
IncludeUPRN

IncludeUPRN

Set to true to include the UPRN for UK addresses. This is not available by default and requires additional licensing - speak to your account manager for additional information.

When this option is enabled, more accurate premise-level information is also used for the geocoding information used by the IncludeLocation option.

Service-Specific Options
Name Description
DefaultCountryCode

DefaultCountryCode

An ISO 2-character code for the country to assume the address is in unless otherwise specified.

DetectCountry

DetectCountry

Set to true to attempt to automatically detect the country from the provided address information, possibly overriding the default country

Country

Country

If DetectCountry is set to true, this is taken as additional user input alongside the address to influence the country detection function. The format of this is not enforced, so could be provided as US, USA or United States

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
Result

Result

Contains the formatted version of the requested address in the Address field, and a structured version of the address in the RawAddress field

MatchLevel

MatchLevel

Indicates how well the supplied address matched to PAF. Possible values are:

  • OK_Unchanged - the supplied address matched to PAF without requiring any changes
  • OK_Corrected - the supplied address matched to PAF but required some corrections to do so
  • NOK_Building - the supplied address could not be matched to a unique address on PAF, but did match to a unique building. More information would be needed to identify a single address within that building. This usually indicates either a commercial building for which an organisation name is required to identify the individual company in it, or an apartment building but no flat or apartment number has been supplied
  • NOK_Street - the supplied address could not be matched to a unique address on PAF, but did match to a street. If building information has been supplied it does not match to that on PAF or is ambiguous between two or more different buildings.
  • NOK_Town - the supplied address could not be matched to a unique address on PAF. Only the town name could be matched - the street and building information did not match or was ambiguous.
  • NOK_NoMatch - the supplied address could not be matched at all to PAF.
  • NOK_Foreign - the address appears to be non-UK and therefore has not been matched to PAF.
CountryName

CountryName

The name of the country the address is in. This is only populated when the IncludeCountry option is set to true

Live Demo

address

Lines

Sorry, this parameter type is not currently supported in Live Demo
options
Name Value
Common Options
Address Formatting Options
Geocoding Options
Address Unique Reference Options
Service-Specific Options

Sample Code