jpostal

These are the Java/JNI bindings to libpostal, a fast, multilingual NLP library (written in C) for parsing/normalizing physical addresses around the world.

Usage

To expand address strings into normalized forms suitable for geocoder queries:

import com.mapzen.jpostal.AddressExpander;

// Singleton, libpostal setup is done in the constructor
AddressExpander e = AddressExpander.getInstance();
String[] expansions = e.expandAddress("Quatre vingt douze Ave des Champs-Élysées");

To parse addresses into components:

import com.mapzen.jpostal.AddressParser;

// Singleton, parser setup is done in the constructor
AddressParser p = AddressParser.getInstance();
ParsedComponent[] components = p.parseAddress("The Book Club 100-106 Leonard St, Shoreditch, London, Greater London, EC2A 4RH, United Kingdom");

for (ParsedComponent c : components) {
    System.out.printf("%s: %s\n", c.getLabel(), c.getValue());
}

To use a libpostal installation with a datadir known at setup-time:

import com.mapzen.jpostal.AddressParser;
import com.mapzen.jpostal.AddressExpander;

AddressExpander e = AddressExpander.getInstanceDataDir("/some/path");
AddressParser p = AddressParser.getInstanceDataDir("/some/path");

Building libpostal

Before building the Java bindings, you must install the libpostal C library. Make sure you have the following prerequisites:

On Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install curl autoconf automake libtool pkg-config

On CentOS/RHEL

sudo yum install curl autoconf automake libtool pkgconfig

On Mac OSX

brew install curl autoconf automake libtool pkg-config

Installing libpostal

git clone https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal
cd libpostal
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --datadir=[...some dir with a few GB of space...]

make
sudo make install

# On Linux it's probably a good idea to run
sudo ldconfig

Note: libpostal >= v0.3.3 is required to use this binding.

Building jpostal

Only one command is needed:

./gradlew assemble

This will leverage gradle's NativeLibrarySpec support to build for the JNI/C portion of the library and installs the resulting shared libraries in the expected location for java.library.path

Usage in a Java project

The JNI portion of jpostal builds shared object files (.so on Linux, .jniLib on Mac) that need to be on java.library.path. After running gradle assemble the .so/.jniLib files can be found under ./libs/jpostal/shared in the build dir. For running the tests, we set java.library.path explicitly here.

Compatibility

Building jpostal is known to work on Linux and Mac OSX (including Mac silicon).

Tests

To run the tests:

./gradlew check

License

The package is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.