'''Example 1''' Some French Place Titles take the form of 5 strings (Town, a numeric Postal Code, Department, Region, Country) e.g. Avignon,84000,Vaucluse,Provence-Cote-d'Azur,FRANCE, where some fields may be missing e.g. Woerth,,,Alsace,FRANCE, the regex: \s*(?P<city>[^,]+)[,]\s*(?P<zip>\d*)[,](?P<county>[^,]*)[,](?P<state>[^,]*)[,](?P<country>[^,]*)[,]*$  treating the comma character as an end-of-string delimiter, will distributeAvignon to City, 84000 to ZIP, Vaucluse to County, Province-Cote-d'Azur to State and France to Country  and in the case of missing fields, as long as the first is not empty, will distribute Woerth to City, Alsace to State and FRANCE to Country. It allows initial whitespace and an optional comma after the Country '''Example 2''' In many 16th and 17th century English IGI records the situation is more complicated.  The Place Title takes the form of 3 strings (Town, County, Country) or 4 strings (Parish, District, County, Country) for example: