How The Streetlayer API Lets You do Real-time, International Address Validation and Autocomplete

Introduction

Streetlayer is a straightforward white label API solution for real time international address validation, autocomplete and geocoding. Whether you're looking for a solution to clean your customer database or validate customer data as it enters your system, streetlayer may be right for you.

Streetlayer analyzes and verifies international address data by cross-referencing complete addresses as well as each fraction provided using a massive data set, updated weekly, sourced from a wide range of vendors and institutions around the world.

Unlike Google's API's, there's no co-branding and pre-defined usage model; programming options and limits are less restricted.

Also, the streetlayer API provides all of its results in industry standard JSON which make them simple and easy to parse into your own services and databases.

In today's tutorial, I'm going to provide a high level introduction to the streetlayer API to help you understand its capabilities and to get started quickly and easily. It's three key focus areas are:

1. Address Validation: Ensure high-quality customer data sets by analyzing, validating and formatting international addresses at the moment they enter your system or existing data sets that you wish to clean up.
2. Autocomplete: The streetlayer API is capable of delivering address suggestions based on the shortest strings.
3. Geocoding and Reverse Lookups: Make use of the latitude and longitude coordinate values that come with each address validation or suggest the nearest complete address in real time by passing browser coordinates to the API.

I'll guide you through how to use each of them below.

The Streetlayer API is simple and secure. You make requests using an easy-to-integrate GET URL structure, delivered in lightweight JSON format, and secured via 256-bit HTTPS encryption.

Streetlayer provides a comprehensive trouble-free solution for your service needs. There's also outstanding detailed API documentation, excellent technical support and extended usage statistics.

Streetlayer is the latest solution from apilayer, an established leader in product APIs. Apilayer aims to help developers and businesses automate and outsource complex processes by serving them with dedicated and handy programming interfaces.

Let's get started.

Using the streetlayer API

Registration

If you'd like to experiment with the streetlayer api, you can easily sign up for their free plan.

The free plan offers 100 monthly requests. Streetlayer also offers paid plans beginning with the Basic Plan which offers 500 API requests at $9.99 USD monthly.

Signing up for a trial or a paid account is simple, you just need to fill out their registration form:

The Dashboard

Once you're registered, you can visit the streetlayer dashboard and obtain your API access key. Later on, you can browse this area for usage statistics, to change subscription plans or account information.

There's also a quick Validate Address functional demo:

There's also a quick Validate Address functional demo:The JSON results are displayed in another browser tab like this:

{"success":true,"validation_status":"valid","address_components":{"country_code_alpha2":"US","country_code_alpha3":"USA","country":"United States","county":"King County","locality":"Seattle","postal_code":"98109","region":"Washington","region_code":"WA","street":"Broad Street","housenumber":"400","neighbourhood":"Belltown"},"validation_result":{"locality":true,"county":null,"region":null,"postal_code":true,"street":true,"housenumber":true},"formatted_address":["400 Broad Street","Seattle, WA 98109","United States"],"coordinates":{"latitude":47.620495,"longitude":-122.3493}}

You can also prettify any streetlayer API result by adding a trailing URL query argument &format=1 (only use this for debugging as it increases response size):

The above result then looks like this:

{
 "success":true,
 "validation_status":"valid",
 "address_components":{
   "country_code_alpha2":"US",
   "country_code_alpha3":"USA",
   "country":"United States",
   "county":"King County",
   "locality":"Seattle",
   "postal_code":"98109",
   "region":"Washington",
   "region_code":"WA",
   "street":"Broad Street",
   "housenumber":"400",
   "neighbourhood":"Belltown"
 },
 "validation_result":{
   "locality":true,
   "county":null,
   "region":null,
   "postal_code":true,
   "street":true,
   "housenumber":true
 },
 "formatted_address":[
   "400 Broad Street",
   "Seattle, WA 98109",
   "United States"
 ],
 "coordinates":{
   "latitude":47.620495,
   "longitude":-122.3493
 }
}

The company reports its average streetlayer API response time, surveyed over a wide range of international addresses, is generally between 500-600 milliseconds.

The streetlayer Documentation

Once you have your access key and are ready to begin using streetlayer, the API documentation provides all the information you need as a developer.

Briefly, the documentation is excellent. It offers quick demonstration links (you have to be signed in to use them):

They also show examples of errors and a breakdown of the possible codes you'll encounter:

Here's a snapshot of some of the codes:

Now, I'll begin reviewing each of the streetlayer API services in more detail.

Streetlayer API Features

First, let's look at address validation and verification.

Address Validation and Verification

The streetlayer API is capable of verifying international address data in a variety of formats.