How to Validate a Postal Code in PHP

It’s important that new address information is correct before that data becomes available downstream in our application’s workflow.

Thankfully, we can easily validate postal codes with the free-to-use API provided below. A request containing a postal code, country name & country code will return a Boolean indicating if the postal value is valid, along with detailed latitude and longitude coordinates describing the location of the postal code in question. For example, making the following request:

{
  "PostalCode": "94588",
  "CountryFullName": "United States of America",
  "CountryCode": "USA"
}

Will return the following response:

{
  "ValidPostalCode": true,
  "City": null,
  "StateOrProvince": "California",
  "Latitude": 37.6932951,
  "Longitude": -121.925068362744
}

To structure our API call, we can begin by running the below command to install the client SDK:

composer require cloudmersive/cloudmersive_validate_api_client

After that, we can copy & paste from the ready-to-run code examples below to send information to the underlying service:

<?php
require_once(__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php');

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
$config = Swagger\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setApiKey('Apikey', 'YOUR_API_KEY');



$apiInstance = new Swagger\Client\Api\AddressApi(
    
    
    new GuzzleHttp\Client(),
    $config
);
$input = new \Swagger\Client\Model\ValidatePostalCodeRequest(); // \Swagger\Client\Model\ValidatePostalCodeRequest | Input parse request

try {
    $result = $apiInstance->addressValidatePostalCode($input);
    print_r($result);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo 'Exception when calling AddressApi->addressValidatePostalCode: ', $e->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
}
?>

We can authenticate our requests with a free-tier API key by registering a free account on the Cloudmersive website.

That’s all there is to it — no need to worry about invalid Postal Codes anymore!