Address Data

We’re having to process a lot of data at work. We’re spinning through data from a legacy system and parsing the data which has been kept in all sorts of different formats for addresses.

An awful lot of data doesn’t have spaces where you’d think spaces should be so I’m left looking for solutions… I thought about abbreviating the strings using Intelligent String Abbreviation from the lovely JSPRO.COM:

function abbreviate(str, max, suffix){
  if((str = str.replace(/^s+|s+$/g, '').replace(/[rn]*s*[rn]+/g, ' ').replace(/[ t]+/g, ' ')).length <= max){
    return str;
  }
  var abbr = '',
  str = str.split(' '),
  suffix = (typeof suffix !== 'undefined' ? suffix : ' ...'),
  max = (max - suffix.length);
  for(var len = str.length, i = 0; i &lt; len; i ++){
    if((abbr + str[i]).length &lt; max){
      abbr += str[i] + ' ';
    }else {
      break;
    }
  }
  return abbr.replace(/[ ]$/g, '') + suffix;
}

But after thinking about it I clocked that it was simply a question of replacing “,” with “, ” but only when the comma wasn’t being followed by a space. I guess that HTML would be fine with more than one space but it offended my sensibilities to indiscriminately replace commas with commas and spaces…

This, however, does the trick very nicely (Thanks Lars):

var str = str.replace(/[,^s]/g,", ");