uk_postcode
UK postcode parsing and validation for Ruby for writing friendly software.
Features:
- Handles errors with
I
/1
andO
/0
. - Does not require postcodes to contain spaces.
- Normalises postcodes (e.g.
wiaiaa
toW1A 1AA
). - Parses full postcodes or outcodes (
W1A
) - Allows extraction of fields within postcode.
- Validated against 2.5 million postcodes in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man.
- Finds the country corresponding to a postcode, where possible.
Usage
require "uk_postcode"
Parse and extract sections of a full postcode:
pc = UKPostcode.parse("W1A 2AB")
pc.valid? # => true
pc.full? # => true
pc.full_valid? # => true
pc.outcode # => "W1A"
pc.incode # => "2AB"
pc.area # => "W"
pc.district # => "1A"
pc.sector # => "2"
pc.unit # => "AB"
Or of a partial postcode:
pc = UKPostcode.parse("W1A")
pc.valid? # => true
pc.full? # => false
pc.full_valid? # => false
pc.outcode # => "W1A"
pc.incode # => nil
pc.area # => "W"
pc.district # => "1A"
pc.sector # => nil
pc.unit # => nil
Postcodes are converted to a normal or canonical form:
pc = UKPostcode.parse("w1a1aa")
pc.valid? # => true
pc.area # => "W"
pc.district # => "1A"
pc.sector # => "1"
pc.unit # => "AA
pc.to_s # => "W1A 1AA"
And mistakes with I/1 and O/0 are corrected:
pc = UKPostcode.parse("WIA OAA")
pc.valid? # => true
pc.area # => "W"
pc.district # => "1A"
pc.sector # => "0"
pc.unit # => "AA
pc.to_s # => "W1A 0AA"
Find the country of a full or partial postcode (if possible: some outcodes span countries):
UKPostcode.parse("W1A 1AA").country # => :england
UKPostcode.parse("BT4").country # => :northern_ireland
UKPostcode.parse("CA6").country # => :unknown
UKPostcode.parse("CA6 5HS").country # => :scotland
UKPostcode.parse("CA6 5HT").country # => :england
The country returned for a postcode is derived from the ONS Postcode Directory and might not always be correct in a border region:
Users should note that postcodes that straddle two geographic areas will be assigned to the area where the mean grid reference of all the addresses within the postcode falls.
Invalid postcodes:
pc = UKPostcode.parse("Not Valid")
pc.valid? # => false
pc.full? # => false
pc.full_valid? # => false
pc.area # => nil
pc.to_s # => "Not valid"
pc.country # => :unknown
Tips for Rails
You can normalise postcodes on assignment by overriding a setter method (this
assumes that you have a postcode
field on the model):
def postcode=(str)
super UKPostcode.parse(str).to_s
end
Invalid postcodes are parsed to instances of InvalidPostcode
, whose #to_s
method gives the original input, so an invalid postcode will be presented back
to the user as originally entered.
To validate, use something like this:
class PostcodeValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
ukpc = UKPostcode.parse(value)
unless ukpc.full_valid?
record.errors[attribute] << "not recognised as a UK postcode"
end
end
end
class Address
validates :postcode, presence: true, postcode: true
end
For users of version 1.x
The interface has changed significantly, so code that worked with version 1.x will not work with version 2.x without changes.
Specifically:
- Use
UKPostcode.parse(str)
where you previously usedUKPostcode.new(str)
. parse
will return either aGeographicPostcode
, aGiroPostcode
, or anInvalidPostcode
.- You may prefer to use
GeographicPostcode.parse
directly if you wish to excludeGIR 0AA
and invalid postcodes.
As a gem
In your Gemfile
:
gem "uk_postcode", "~> 2.1.0"
Testing
To run the test suite:
$ make
The full list of UK postcodes is not included in the repository due to its size, but will be fetched automatically from mySociety.
If you are running an automatic build process, please find a way to cache these files and run the tests via Rake instead:
$ rake
Occasionally asked questions
Does it support Father Christmas's postcode?
No. The old postcode was SAN TA1; the current one is XM4 5HQ. (XMAS HQ, geddit?) For most people, these probably aren't useful, as they don't correspond to actual locations, and are only used by Royal Mail internally.
See "Adding additional formats" if you'd like to support this.
Does it support BFPO?
No. They're not really postcodes, though they serve a similar purpose. Some of them are abroad; some of them are on boats that move around; some of them are ephemeral and exists only for particular operations. This library has been designed with the assumption that most people won't want to handle BFPO codes, and that those that do can do so explicitly.
See "Adding additional formats" if you'd like to support them.
The new BF1 format postcodes can be parsed, although their location is always unknown.
Adding additional formats
Parsing is implemented via the ParserChain
class, which attempts to parse
the supplied text via each parser in turn.
The UKPostcode.parse
method is effectively a thin wrapper that does this:
chain = ParserChain.new(GiroPostcode, GeographicPostcode, InvalidPostcode)
chain.parse(str)
Each class passed to ParserChain.new
must implement a class method
parse(str)
and return either a postcode object (see AbstractPostcode
) or
nil.
The first non-nil object is returned.
InvalidPostcode
is at the end of the chain to ensure that a postcode object
is always returned.
To add an additional class, subclass AbstractPostcode
, implement the abstract
methods, and instantiate your own ParserChain
.
Licensing
You may use this library according to the terms of the MIT License; see COPYING.txt for details.
The regular expressions in country_lookup.rb
are derived from the ONS
Postcode Directory according to the terms of the
Open Government Licence.
Under the terms of the Open Government Licence (OGL) […] anyone wishing to use or re-use ONS material, whether commercially or privately, may do so freely without a specific application for a licence, subject to the conditions of the OGL and the Framework. Users reproducing ONS content must include a source accreditation to ONS.
In order to avoid the restrictive commercial terms of the Northern Ireland
data in the ONSPD, this is not used to generate the regular expressions.
Fortunately, Northern Ireland postcodes are very simple: they all start with
BT
!