Southern Ontario FSA Border Streets

[Sampson, David]

Hey Folks,

I am taking a look at southern Ontario, specifically St Catherines and
GTA.

I tried to come up with a systematic search and replace for St
Catherines and only had a few instances that I needed to check the PDF
for varification. Ther are not many names on that map.

The GTA though is a whole new ball game (20 pages at 12 pt font after
removing all FSA codes)....  Within the first page I would say close to
a %60-70 check back ratio, where I needed to check the original PDF and
the names did not appear in a predicatble manner.

For instance prefix or suffix would apear 2 to three lines previous or
after the name of the road. And also some names were split due to
length. It is less teadious when names and prefix/suffix occur on
sequential lines. One process I used was to replace any manual line
break with nothing, making the whole document one continuous text
string. And then replacing key SUFFIX's with a coma (,) and a line
break. The comman was a reminder than the name has been process, and the
line break makes it an independent record.

I would use common ones like RD, ST, CIR, AVE etc and for smaller areas
this worked quite well for a process, but had no means of verifying if
the names are what they are supposed to be. 

I explored the concept of using th RNF DBF as an Excell Verticle lookup
table, but Excell is limited after that. A Vertcile lookup table can be
used to check a given value (eg suggested road name text string) against
a standard list. This is a dirty approach but I can keep exploring it.

Does Walter have any ideas as to how we can process the raw names and
try to standardize them?

Although it IS possible to manualy match street names for the GTA this
would be nothing less than a Nobel task.

Cheers
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