Quebec Address Generator

QC — province. Postal district G, H, J.

Quebec addresses are written differently, not just translated — which makes this the region to test character encoding, internationalisation and address parsing against.

Postal districts

G — Eastern Québec, including Québec City and Trois-Rivières.
H — The island of Montréal.
J — Western Québec — Gatineau, Sherbrooke.

A worked QC postal code: H2S 2X0.

How addresses in Quebec are written

Rosalie Boucher
5402, chemin de la Rivière
bureau 34
Montréal QC  H2S 2X0
Canada

ROSALIE BOUCHER
BUREAU 34
5402 CHEMIN DE LA RIVIÈRE
MONTRÉAL QC  H2S 2X0
CANADA

What makes Quebec different

The civic number is followed by a comma

A Quebec address line reads 1234, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest. That comma is part of the format, and it breaks a very common parsing shortcut: splitting an address string on commas to separate street from city. Run French-form records through your parser before you trust it on Canadian input.

The street type comes first, and is lowercase

English Canadian addresses put the type last and capitalised — Yonge Street. French ones put it first and lowercase — rue Sainte-Catherine. Any normaliser that capitalises every word, or that looks for the street type at the end of the line, produces wrong output on Quebec records.

Accented characters, in real positions

Québec, Montréal, des Érables, Côte-des-Neiges, René-Lévesque. These are not decorative: they appear in the municipality, the street name and the recipient. That makes Quebec records the practical test for UTF-8 round-tripping through your database, your CSV export and your PDF renderer, and for collation — é must sort next to e, not after z.

Unit designators differ

A Quebec unit is app. for an apartment or bureau for an office, not Apt or Suite. A form with a hard-coded English unit label, or a validator with an allow-list of unit words, rejects legitimate Quebec addresses.

What developers use QC records for

Round-trip UTF-8 through the whole stack — Generate Quebec records, write them to your database, export to CSV, re-import, and diff. Accented characters surface every place a connection charset, a column collation or a file encoding is wrong.
Break a comma-splitting address parser — Feed French-form address lines to any parser that splits on commas. The civic-number comma means the first field is a bare number rather than a street.
Test collation and sorting — Sort a mixed batch of Quebec recipient names. If Élise sorts after Zachary, your collation is byte order rather than locale-aware, and your user-facing lists are wrong.
Validate a bilingual address form — Set the locale to French for Quebec records and English elsewhere, and confirm your form accepts both shapes without a rule written for one leaking into the other.
Check fixed-width and column-width assumptions — Accented characters are multi-byte in UTF-8. Any layout that budgets bytes rather than characters — a fixed-width export, a padded report column — misaligns on Quebec records.

Quebec questions

Are the generated Quebec addresses in French?

Yes, by default. Quebec records use French street types, French directionals (Nord, Sud, Est, Ouest), the civic-number comma, and app. or bureau for units. You can force English forms with the locale option if you need to compare the two.

What are the Quebec postal districts?

Three: G for eastern Québec including Québec City, H for the island of Montréal, and J for western Québec. Every generated Quebec postal code starts with one of those.

Why is the municipality sometimes Montréal and sometimes Montreal?

French-locale records use the French form with the accent; English-locale records use the unaccented one. Both are in use, and a system that handles Canadian addresses should tolerate either.

Can I use these to test an address form that rejects accents?

That is one of the better uses for them. A form that rejects é is rejecting real Canadian addresses, and generating a batch of Quebec records is the fastest way to demonstrate it.

Every record is synthetic, generated for development, QA, testing, demos and staging. These records do not represent real people, and the addresses are not verified deliverable addresses.