woah. This is a regex use I've never heard of. I'd absolutely love to see a writeup on this approach - how its done and when it's useful.

You can literally | together every street address or other string you want to match in a giant disjunction, and then run a DFA/NFA minimization over that to get it down to a reasonable size. Maybe there are some fast regex simplification algorithms as well, but working directly with the finite automata has decades of research and probably can be more fully optimized.