

Ask HN: Is there a free download of countries and their major cities available? - talkaboutadate

I've got an app that needs to list countries and major cities in a couple of drop down boxes. I found one but it costs $1049.95 - http://www.download32.com/geodatasource-world-cities-database--gold-edition--i24139.html. Anyone know of anything a little cheaper, like free?
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dkasper
You could get the 2 largest cities in each country from here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_and_seco...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_and_second_largest_cities_by_country)

Or this has the capital and cities larger than the capital:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_largest_ci...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_largest_cities_by_country)

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amarcus
Javascript code that displays a drop down of Coutry and State:
[http://javascript.internet.com/forms/country-state-drop-
down...](http://javascript.internet.com/forms/country-state-drop-down.html)

I know you wanted cities, but maybe this could do

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talkaboutadate
Thanks, amarcus, but I needed cities too.

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galleypage
You could use MONDIAL. <http://www.dbis.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/Mondial/>

The database is pretty extensive, but you should only need to query it once to
get what you need.

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talkaboutadate
Thanks, guys/girls. Looking at the forums on geonames it seems like it's over
kill and that it may be slow reading such a large database, and mondial seems
to be the same. I think I may spend a day or two typing in the countries and
cities myself!

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hugh
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries> ?

And then about eight hours' work to look up and type in the names of all the
major cities in each country?

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globalrev
Or do some hacking...

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talkaboutadate
Yep. That's what I thought. Thanks. Surely, if someone did this, s/he could
charge a little for it to all the other developers out there.

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nnrcschmdt
Did you look at GeoNames? <http://www.geonames.org/>

It would require you to do some parsing to filter what you need but the info
is there.

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globalrev
Ok I found something:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_larger_cit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_larger_cities_by_country)

