Posted by vunet.us on 06/19/07 17:26

On Jun 19, 12:56 pm, "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorp...@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> Scripsit Beauregard T. Shagnasty:
>
> > A visitor, once realizing you are checking zipcodes, may still enter a
> > bogus name and street address.
>
> Or he may move to a better site.
>
> There are sites that require registration for no understandable purpose,
> just collecting personal information from users, without ever using the
> information for any legitimate end. Such collection of personal data is
> illegal within the European Union, though apparently not in the US. But
> users indeed have the option of entering bogus data that just meets the
> syntactic requirements. If you ever intend to _use_ the data, it will be
> more seriously bogus than without the syntactic checks! (That's because a
> larger part of it _looks_ OK.)
>
> We cannot know whether that's the case in the OP's problem, but I'd suggest
> considering seriously what data you really _need_ - and check it well
> server-side. On the other hand, if it's e.g. an e-commerce site where people
> can buy things - so that you really need some addresses - then it's mainly
> in the users' interest to type in their addresses correctly. You can just
> remind them of this.
>
> Any checks have the risk of rejecting correct data. It's actually _very_
> difficult to check even an e-mail address reliably. Zip codes might be
> easier since they constitute a finite and known set, but what happens when
> the set changes, e.g. new codes are added?
>
> --
> Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

What if I use google map to determine a valid address? I'd get HTML of
the map page with user-supplied 'loc' string and if google does not
find it (will contain string "No match found" inside) I will alert the
user of a wrong address entered...?

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