The Big List of Naughty Addresses

Over-Length Fields

Over-length fields, part of Fake Addresses' Big List of Naughty Addresses, are address components deliberately longer than most forms expect, built to test whether a street-address input, a city field, or a name field truncates silently, throws a validation error, or overflows a fixed-width database column. A form that silently truncates a 300-character street-address line is a data-loss bug that happy-path test data will never surface.

Examples in this set include street names padded past 100 characters and a full address block exceeding 500 characters when every line is concatenated. None of these describe a real deliverable address — they are stress inputs, not addresses anyone should mail to.

• Street: Northwest Saint Bartholomew's Old Mill Race and Turnpike Extension Boulevard, Suite 4400-B
• City: East North West Saint Lake Harbor Township
• Full block: a street line, city line, and last line concatenated past 500 characters when tested as a single input

Unicode and RTL Street Names

Unicode and right-to-left (RTL) street names, another Fake Addresses edge-case category, test whether an address form, a database column, and a rendered UI all handle characters outside the basic ASCII range the same way. A street name in Arabic script, a city name with combining diacritics, or a mixed left-to-right and right-to-left string can each break a different layer: input validation, storage encoding, or text rendering and cursor behavior.

This category is not about generating address data for Arabic-speaking countries specifically — it is about confirming a form built for one alphabet does not quietly mangle, reverse, or reject a legitimately different one.

• Arabic script (RTL): شارع الملك فهد
• Cyrillic: улица Ленина 14
• Combining diacritics: Straße Königsallee
• Mixed-direction string: Building 7 شارع النصر Floor 2

Apostrophes and Hyphens in Street Names

Apostrophes and hyphens in street names, a Fake Addresses edge-case category, are one of the oldest, most common causes of a broken address form, because both characters carry special meaning in SQL and in some URL-encoding schemes when a form is not built defensively. A street genuinely named O'Brien Street or Saint-Jean-Baptiste Avenue is common in the real world, not an edge case invented for testing.

A form that fails on an apostrophe is a SQL-injection defense implemented carelessly, not a legitimate rejection — real streets named this way exist by the thousands, and a QA suite should include them specifically because they are common, not rare.

• O'Brien Street
• D'Angelo Circle
• Saint-Jean-Baptiste Avenue
• Coeur-d'Alene Drive

Multi-Line Addresses

Multi-line addresses, in Fake Addresses' edge-case set, are delivery addresses that need more than the standard two address lines to describe fully — a building name, a floor, and a department all on separate lines before the street and city lines. Many international address formats, and some large US commercial addresses, genuinely require three or four address lines, not the two a simpler form assumes.

Testing with a multi-line address confirms a form's address-line count is actually sufficient, and that whatever storage or display layer sits behind it does not silently drop the third or fourth line.

• Acme Corp
• Receiving Dept, Building 4, Floor 2
• 500 Industrial Pkwy
• Springfield, IL 62704

PO Boxes

PO boxes, one more Fake Addresses edge-case category, are Postal Service-operated mailboxes with no associated street address at all, addressed as "PO Box" plus a number rather than a street name and number. A significant share of real mail in the US goes to a PO box, and a form that assumes every address has a street name and number will reject a legitimate PO box address outright.

USPS Publication 28 has dedicated formatting rules for PO box addresses specifically because they are common enough to need their own standard, not because they are unusual.

• PO BOX 4521
• P.O. Box 88
• PO Box 100, Rural Branch

APO/FPO Military Addresses

APO and FPO addresses, part of the Fake Addresses edge-case set, route mail to US military personnel stationed overseas, using a military post office designation instead of a city and a two-letter overseas designator instead of a state — for example APO AE 09021 rather than a foreign city and country. A form that assumes every address maps to a real country in a dropdown will break on a legitimate military address that intentionally omits one.

USPS Publication 28 treats APO/FPO addresses as domestic mail for routing purposes even though the destination is physically overseas, which is exactly the kind of rule a naive form validator gets wrong.

• PSC 1234 BOX 12345, APO AE 09021
• UNIT 2345 BOX 1234, FPO AP 96601

Countries With No Postal Code (UAE)

Countries with no postal code, such as the United Arab Emirates, are a Fake Addresses edge-case category that tests whether a form correctly makes the postal-code field optional per country rather than requiring one universally. The UAE has no national postal-code system at all; mail and deliveries rely on PO boxes and emirate names instead of a ZIP-equivalent field.

A form that hard-requires a postal code for every country will reject every legitimately formatted UAE address, which is a common, easily reproduced international bug — UPU S42 templates mark a country's postal-code field as absent rather than optional for exactly this reason.

• PO Box 12345, Dubai, United Arab Emirates — no postal code field populated

Eircodes (Ireland)

Eircodes, a Fake Addresses edge-case category, are Ireland's postal-code system, and they behave unlike almost any other country's postal code: each Eircode is unique to an individual building or address rather than shared by a street or neighborhood, formatted as a routing key (such as D02) followed by a unique identifier (such as AF30). A form built assuming a postal code covers a street-sized area, the way a US ZIP+4 roughly does, will mishandle an Eircode-based address lookup.

Testing with real-format Eircodes confirms an international address form does not assume every country's postal-code granularity works the same way the US or UK's does.

• D02 AF30
• T12 X2FE

Japanese Prefecture Ordering

Japanese prefecture ordering, the final Fake Addresses edge-case category on this page, reverses the line order most Western address forms assume: a Japanese domestic address is written largest-unit first — postal code, then prefecture, then city, then ward or block, then building — the opposite of the US convention of smallest-unit first. A form hardcoded to expect street, city, state, ZIP in that order will scramble a correctly formatted Japanese address rather than reject it outright, which is a harder bug to catch than an outright validation failure.

Testing with a genuinely reordered Japanese-format address confirms an internationalized form actually branches its field order by country rather than reusing one Western template everywhere — the same principle UPU S42 templates exist to encode per country.

• 〒100-0001 東京都千代田区千代田1-1 (postal code, prefecture, city, block — largest unit first)

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• United States Postal Service — Postal Explorer — USPS Publication 28 defines a "standardized address" as one using official USPS abbreviations, and a "complete address" as one containing everything needed to match the ZIP+4 and City State files.
• Universal Postal Union — The Universal Postal Union runs an addressing-solutions programme, including international addressing standards and assistance to member countries whose addresses do not follow a US or UK-style format.

Related reference pages