Allow for auto-completion of street suffixes

[openstreetmap-trac]

Reporter: Clorox
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 1.37pm, Tuesday, 4th January 2011]

For example, if I type "Main St" as the value for the "name" key, the value should end up saying "Main Street". This could be implemented in many different ways, including:

• replacing the abbreviation after a space is typed

• replacing the abbreviation as soon as it is recognized (this might cause problems, i.e. I want to type "Isle", but auto-complete recognizes "Is" and replaces it with "Island" instantly.)

• replacing the abbreviation after a keyboard shortcut is pressed

• replacing the abbreviation after the value is completely entered and focus has been taken away from it

Text file including all USPS-recognized abbreviations:
http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/abbr_suffix.txt

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: monxton
[Added to the original trac issue at 9.53am, Monday, 18th April 2011]

would need to be country-specific

[openstreetmap-trac]

Author: c2r
[Added to the original trac issue at 9.41pm, Wednesday, 27th July 2011]

Just a comment... This type of auto formatting of bulk address data which has been manually inputted into a large database is something as part of my day job we looked at trying to automatically clean. However, the pitfalls are many.

1. Different regions and countries use different notation (and words, obviously). Germany and Finland suffix with a join (e.g. -str. and -katu), whereas countries like Spain prefix, e.g. calle de.. Just because I'm mapping in the UK one week doesn't mean I wont be mapping in Spain the next - so this means auto-correction without a hotkey sounds very tricky to implement

2. different abbreviations can be used for different purposes even within the same language. For example, Chalfont St. Giles - even if you think you're being clever by looking for a space before the st. to convert to street, you might end up with Chalfont Street Giles.

3. the same abbreviation can be used for different purposes in different localities. Would ct. be court or crescent? Ur. could mean 'aged' in German or 'urbanisation' in Spain

4. Garmin satnavs get this horribly wrong by trying to hard... Exit "East"-15 right, enter roundabout and take "North"-332

The conclusion at work we came up with was, that unless it works absolutely foolproofly, it is better to do nothing than to go down the Garmin route of trying too hard...!