OT: Country -> (State) -> City/Town (XML/JSON)

rubyonrails-talk
1

Does anyone know where I can find Country → (State) → City/Town data in easy to read format (XML/JSON)?

I need it for my application and would like a good base of countries/states/towns/cities before I start asking users to add missing information.

Regards

-ants

2

"Ants Pants" <antsmailinglist@gmail.com> wrote in message news:v2pc1f9ecae1004071202t245eb8cbgd08ffb44c1dcaf1d@mail.gmail.com...

Does anyone know where I can find Country -> (State) -> City/Town data in >easy to read format (XML/JSON)?

There is a databse that provides city (and state/province information for the US and Canada). It is freely available, but requires a short message in the legal section of your site, as well as in any documention/advertisements that mention the address portion of the product. If sounds acceptable, then what you want is:

MaxMind's worldcitiespop.txt database. The database is a text file encoded using the ISO-8859-1 encoding. It is a simple comma seperated value (CSV) database. The fields are CountryCode, ASCIICityName, CityName, StateCode, Population, Latitude, Longitude.

You can ignore the last 3 fields. You will need a database to match CountryCodes to country names, but MaxMind provides one. A trivial 2 feild CSV file. You will also need a State/CanadaProvince-code to name, and MaxMind also provides that too, as a trivial 2 field CSV file.

A few quick gotchas: The file is 130MB uncompressed, and is a 30 MB download. The first line is not a record, but gives the feild names. A few cities might have country codes of "A1","A2","EU",or "AP". you should not include those, since they are special codes for the geoIP database. The statecode feild has a numeric region code for countries other than the US or Canada, I'd advise you ignore them.

The main database is at: http://www.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/worldcitiespop.txt.gz The license is at: http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/LICENSE_WC.txt

The Country Code and City Code databases are small enough they provide them as text on html pages: http://www.maxmind.com/app/iso3166 and http://www.maxmind.com/app/iso3166\_2 respectively.

I hope this helps.