Tools › Entity types

Redact postal codes from text, JSON, and CSV

Postal codes rarely identify anyone alone, but combined with a date of birth they narrow a population to a handful of people. Treat them as quasi-identifiers rather than harmless metadata.

How Redactly detects postal codes

• Reported when the model flags the value, or when a postcode appears directly after a cue such as postcode or ZIP; the regex then expands the match to the full code.
• Recognises US 5-digit and ZIP+4 forms, UK alphanumeric postcodes, and four-digit European codes.
• Longer digit strings such as account numbers are not truncated into a postcode match.

Why redact postal codes?

Postal code is one of the classic quasi-identifiers used to re-identify supposedly anonymous records.

Example request

curl -X POST https://api.bitbanger.in/v1/redact \
  -H "X-API-Key: rdct_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text": "Postcode: BS8 4QA, delivery window 09:00-12:00.", "style": "replace"}'

Every hit in the response carries entity, text, start, and end. The offsets index into the text you sent, so you can apply the redactions to your own copy of the document. The full response schema is in the API reference.

Questions

Related entity types

• Street addressesRedact postal addresses from free text and structured payloads, including partial street names the model only half-captures.
• Dates of birthRedact dates of birth in numeric, ISO, and written month formats from text and tabular data.
• GPS coordinatesRedact latitude and longitude pairs from delivery records, field-service notes, and mobile telemetry.