We've finally added it to our systems but there is one thing I cannot get my head around: hashed addresses!
As you know, you send over hashed data which is used to search their database. Before you hash, you remove all spaces and lowercase everything.
However, I can't imagine everybody is producing addresses in the same way before hashing them. For example, I am currently doing the following:
- full address
- full address minus commas
- street + post code
- street + post code minus commas
An address will typically include some of the following data:
- First line of address
- Second line of address
- Town / City
- State / County
- Zip / Postal code
- Country
Unfortunately, each system may concatenate these in a different order, they may miss some fields out completely, they may have slightly different data from a hard-coded set (e.g. "United Kingdom" vs "Great Britain" or "CA" versus "California").
Is there some sort of standard I should be using that I'm not aware of?