address-toolkit 1.2.1

Toolkit for cleaning, validating, extracting and contextualising GB address data with PySpark.

Address Toolkit

Introduction

The address toolkit package supports the cleaning and processing of address data registered as a pyspark.sql.DataFrame. The package includes functions for cleaning, validating, extracting and contextualising addresses and address components. Additionally, workflows have been created as an 'out-of-the-box' application combining the functions across cleaning, validating and extracting.

To install the package, run:

pip install address-toolkit

To register a spark dataframe from a CSV, the following code can be run.

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession


spark = SparkSession.builder.master("local").appName("test").getOrCreate()
df = spark.read.csv("test.csv")

A recommended first step in using this package is to apply the clean_punctuation function from address_toolkit.cleaning.

from address_toolkit.cleaning import clean_punctuation

df = clean_punctuation(df, 'address_column', create_flag = True, overwrite = True)

Main Package Contents:

Folder Name	Description	Includes
cleaning	Contains functions to clean addresses	clean_punctuation, denoise_addresses, deduplicate_addresses, deduplicate_postcodes, rectify_postcodes, standardise_street_types, prettify_addresses
validating	Contains functions to validate addresses	validate_from_list, validate_from_regex, validate_postcodes
extracting	Contains functions to extract address components	extract_from_list, extract_from_regex, extract_postcodes
contextualising	Contains functions to contextualise addresses	contextualise_from_lookup
workflows	Contains functions to streamline processing	clean_addresses, validate_addresses, extract_address_components

Supplementary Package Contents (Resources):

Resource	Includes
UK Postcode Regex	postcode_regex
Unit Address Level Regex	flat_regex, room_regex, unit_regex, block_regex, apartment_regex, floor_regex
Noise Regex	consecutive_letters_regex
Miscellaneous Regex	misc_numbers_regex, standalone_numbers_regex, txt_before_numbers_regex, end_address_numbers_regex, start_address_numbers_regex, end_address_identifier_regex
Address Component Lists	town_list, city_list, village_list, hamlet_list, suburb_list, bay_list, place_list, district_list, county_list, allowed_country_list, disallowed_country_list
Keyword Component Lists	contextual_keywords, misc_keywords_list, misc_special_keywords
Address Component Lookups	town_lookup, village_lookup, bay_lookup, hamlet_lookup, suburb_lookup

Note: For unit address level RegEx patterns, alternatives i.e. flat_regex_alternative are available which are less 'strict' in their matching.

Address Component lists and lookups have been created from Ordnance Survey Open Names. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Licensed under the Open Government License v3.0. This dataset is updated quarterly in January, April, July and October.

Postcode processing is based upon the Annex C - Valid post code format specification.

Example Usage

See tutorial.ipynb for full use of all the functions within cleaning, validating, extracting, contextualising and workflows.