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AddressTools Premium: Understanding standardization in AddressTools

What is address standardization?

Standardization is the process of converting multiple known values to a single predetermined format. For example, “United States”, “USA”, “US”, and “United States of America” can each be standardized to “US”.

The same behaviour can also be applied to states. For example, “TX” can be standardized to “Texas”. Standardization is a crucial piece of functionality for organizations running reports on country and state data, or relying on duplicate rules where these field values are compared.

What address fields can be standardized in AddressTools?

Standardization is available for the following fields:

  • Country
  • State

What formats are acceptable for country standardization?

There are five formats available for country standardization, an example for Egypt is provided below:

  • Full name – Egypt
  • ISO-2 – EG
  • ISO-3– EGY
  • Local name (Latin characters) – Miṣr
  • Local name (Native characters) – مِصر‎

This data is stored on the Countries object installed with the package.

An additional object “Alternative Country Names” is also installed with AddressTools. This allows you to store additional common names and/or misspellings of countries that will then be standardized to the parent country record during upsert. Some are installed by default such as “England”, “Scotland”, “Wales”, and “Northern Ireland” which belong to “United Kingdom”.

What formats are acceptable for state standardization?

There are two formats available for state standardization, an example for Texas is provided below

  • Full name – Texas
  • Sub-code value – TX

An additional object “Alternative State Names” is also installed with AddressTools. This allows you to store additional common names and/or misspellings for states that will then be standardized to the parent state record during upsert. Some are installed by default.


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