Remove street addresses from text
A home address is the identifier people most regret sharing, and it is the one most likely to be sitting in a document you were about to paste into a chatbot — on an invoice, a delivery note, a CV, a rental application.
This page detects addresses as whole units: house number, street name and type, optional unit or suite, and the city, state and postcode that follow. Standalone US state + ZIP pairs and UK postcodes are caught separately.
Your text
Safe to paste
Preset: street addresses, postcodes and GPS coordinates.
Mapping — 0 values (only visible in this tab)
| Placeholder | Real value | Uses |
|---|
Check a few rows before you paste — this is the fastest way to spot a detector that grabbed the wrong thing. Nothing here is stored or sent anywhere.
What to look for — 30 detectors, custom terms, exceptions
People & organisations
Government & health IDs
Financial
Technical & secrets
Location
Step 3 — paste the AI’s answer here to put the real values back
The model replies using the placeholders. Paste its answer below and every
[NAME_1] becomes the real name again — using the mapping held in this tab, which
is the only copy that exists.
How it works
- Open this page — the detectors are already set for “Remove addresses”.
- Paste your text, or drop a .txt, .md, .csv, .json or .log file onto the panel.
- Check the highlights: every match is coloured by type, and one click keeps a type as-is.
- Copy the safe version and paste it into the AI tool of your choice.
- Paste the model’s reply back into step 3 to restore the real values.
Matching an address without matching every sentence
The pattern requires a leading house number, at least one capitalised word, and a street type from a fixed list — Street, Avenue, Road, Boulevard, Lane, Drive, Court, Circle, Place, Terrace, Trail, Parkway, Highway, Way, Square and their abbreviations. Requiring the capitalised word is what stops “2 hours drive” and “3 days on the way” from being read as addresses.
When a city, state and ZIP follow the street line, they are absorbed into the same match, so the whole address becomes one placeholder instead of three fragments. Coordinates are matched separately, at four or more decimal places — the precision that pins a building rather than a city.
Why geography is so identifying
HIPAA Safe Harbor does not just remove street addresses: it removes every geographic subdivision smaller than a state, and only allows the first three digits of a ZIP code when the area they cover holds more than 20,000 people. That threshold exists because location narrows a population fast — combined with a birth date and a gender, a fine-grained location has been shown in published studies to identify a large share of people uniquely.
The same logic applies outside healthcare. If you scrub the name but leave the address, you have not de-identified anything: you have simply moved the identifier one field to the right.
Tips
- PO boxes and “care of” lines are not matched — add them to custom terms.
- Non-US, non-UK address formats vary too much for a single pattern; check the highlights and use custom terms where needed.
- Coordinates with three or fewer decimals are left alone: that is city-level precision, not a doorstep.
Detectors are pattern-based and imperfect: read the highlighted output before you paste it anywhere, and confirm your own confidentiality obligations against the current rules for your profession, employer or jurisdiction. Compiled 2026-07-29.
Frequently asked questions
Does it detect addresses without a house number?
No. “Market Street, Philadelphia” alone is indistinguishable from ordinary prose about a street, so a leading number is required. Add such lines to custom terms if they matter in your document.
What about international postcodes?
US ZIP and ZIP+4 (when preceded by a state code) and UK postcodes are detected. Canadian, Indian, Australian and European formats are not yet covered — the UK format is distinctive enough to match safely, while several others collide with ordinary numbers.
Is the address looked up or geocoded?
Never. There is no maps API, no geocoding, no network request. That would send the exact data you are trying to protect to a third party.