NAME

Business::Address::POBox - Check whether an address looks like a P.O.Box

VERSION

version 1.101230

SYNOPSIS

    use Business::Address::POBox;

    my $address = 'Universitaetsstrasse 7, PF 34';
    if (Business::Address::POBox->new->is_pobox($address)) {
        # do something with the address
    }

DESCRIPTION

This class tries to determine whether or not an string refers to a P.O. box. This is sometimes relevant if your business process, for legal reasons, needs a real address and not a P.O. box. Actually, it needs to be a deliverable address. So a real address that happens to have a P.O. box is ok too.

It has predefined blacklists and whitelists that should catch most English and German P.O. box addresses, but you can modify these lists with the methods provided. Note that the entries are literal strings, not regular expressions.

METHODS

new

    my $obj = Business::Address::POBox->new;
    my $obj = Business::Address::POBox->new(%args);

Creates and returns a new object. The constructor will accept as arguments a list of pairs, from component name to initial value. For each pair, the named component is initialized by calling the method of the same name with the given value. If called with a single hash reference, it is dereferenced and its key/value pairs are set as described before.

init

Just calls update() in case the blacklist and/or whitelist was set during the new() call.

update

Call this method when you've changed the whitelist() or the blacklist() so the matcher knows about the changes.

is_pobox

This is the central method of this class. It takes a string argument and checks it against the whitelist and the blacklist.

Returns a true value if the string passes the whitelist or is at least not caught by the blacklist. If the string is caught by the blacklist, anything that resembles a P.O. box is removed from the string, then everything except whitespace and letters is deleted, then the string is trimmed. If any of the remaining whitespace-separated words in the string has more than one character, the whole string is still considered ok.

This is convoluted, but we might be testing the string Au 7, PF 33. So PF would be considered a P.O. box (short for Postfach in German); the remainder, cleaned of non-letters and non-whitespace, is Au. Since this is longer than one character, it's the whole address is still ok.

Of course nothing prevents you from using Dr. Mabuse, P.O.Box 23 or something similar nonsensical. Short of checking whether an address actually exists there's no way of telling whether the remainder is an actual address.

is_pobox_relaxed

Like is_pobox(), but once a string passes the whitelist, it is not checked against the blacklist anymore. That is, if a string matches the whitelist, it is valid. If not, it is checked against the blacklist - if it matches, it is invalid. If it matches neither whitelist nor blacklist, it is valid.

INSTALLATION

See perlmodinstall for information and options on installing Perl modules.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

No bugs have been reported.

Please report any bugs or feature requests through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=Business-Address-POBox.

AVAILABILITY

The latest version of this module is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). Visit http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ to find a CPAN site near you, or see http://search.cpan.org/dist/Business-Address-POBox/.

The development version lives at http://github.com/hanekomu/Business-Address-POBox/. Instead of sending patches, please fork this project using the standard git and github infrastructure.

AUTHOR

  Marcel Gruenauer <marcel@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2007 by Marcel Gruenauer.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

cpanm Business::Address::POBox

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Business::Address::POBox