I have been working on a PHP script to supply the answer to whether an address is classified as “residential” or “commercial.” Originally, I started designing scripts around UPS’s validation services. That’s where I went wrong.

UPS offers two types of address validation web services (both XML-based). The first is an Address Validation (AV) tool, which allows you to use their web service to determine whether or not an address is valid by supplying city, state, and zip. To my knowledge, the AV web service only works for U.S. addresses. The second service is XAV, street level address validation, which allows you to query their servers for address validations, given the address supplied exists within New York or California. Thats great and all, but what about the rest of the country?

To prevent some poor individual from going through the same headaches as I went through, and for the general purpose of building my code collection, I have uploaded the UPS address validation script for you to check out along with the FedEx street level address validation script.

Needless to say, after spending further time researching, I have concluded that FedEx currently has the best street validation web service. FedEx’s version of address validation provides the following features:

    * Provides street-level matches
    * Contains a growing database of company listings to improve your results (not all companies are currently
      listed)
    * Receives monthly updates to its address database
    * Checks addresses within the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada.
    * Distinguishes between business and residential addresses in the U.S. if an exact match is found
    * Is Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS)-certified (a service and rating system for mailers that measures and helps to improve address accuracy)
    * Checks up to 100 addresses in one Web Service request

Enough said.