Geocoding Parsed Addresses without concatenating?

Question

Hello,

I have a dataset where the entire address is broken up in different columns such as house number, direction, ect.... (see attached sample of data). When I go to geocode the only options for the data are address, city, state, and zip? Is there any way to have more fields to select, or must I concatenate all the fields so they fit under the address part? I prefer not to concatenate as I think the results will be more accurate.

What is the best way to geocode these addresses in this format?

Small Sample.xlsx

DavidKallemeyn · Answer

There used to be a way to set it up so that both the reference data and the input address fields were parsed.  Attached is a screenshot of what my old locator looks like when viewed from 10.1.  It was not set up in 10.1 so it cannot be edited/updated.

Can someone from ESRI provide input as to whether you can set it up to geocode parsed input address fields in 10.1?  It would be great to be able to edit the input address fields in the locator properties to add/remove as needed, I would really prefer to avoid having to concatenate.

locatpr_parsed.pdf

TylerBoyle · Answer

The easiest way to remove the double spaces I've found it to start editing you layer. Highlight your address field and do a find and replace. Put a double space in the "find" and single in "replace with". You can run this several times to remove possible triple of quad spaces from the concatenating process.

Tyler

ToddLusk · Answer

I�??m trying to do this now, and I am concatenating, problem is that not all the fields have values and I end up with leading/trailing spaces or double spaces. How can I get it to concatenate but skip over the empty fields? Small sample set attached. There's a pretty easy way to remove "extra" spaces within a string. I picked this tip up from a SQL Server forum/blog somewhere, but it can be adapted for use in any "language" (i.e., VB, Python, etc.). REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(YourString, " ", "<>"), "><", ""), "<>", " ") Basically that does the following: 1) It replaces all instances of a space (" ") with "<>". So if you have two spaces you would see "MAIN<><>ST" after the first "replace". 2) Next, it goes through and replaces all the "><" with a blank (i.e. ""). So then you would have "MAIN<>ST". 3) Lastly, it goes through and replaces all the "<>" with a single space (" "). So you end up with "MAIN ST". It seems to run pretty fast. You can also use "trim", "left trim", or "right trim" (or a combo of those, again, depending on the language) to eliminate the leading and trailing spaces. In Excel specifically, you should be able to use those to essentially "ignore" your blank cells. I wouldn't worry specifically about avoiding them, just make sure junk doesn't end up in them as a result of the concatenation process.