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?

[dkasper]

You could get the 2 largest cities in each country from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_and_seco...

Or this has the capital and cities larger than the capital: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_largest_ci...

[amarcus]

Javascript code that displays a drop down of Coutry and State: http://javascript.internet.com/forms/country-state-drop-down...

I know you wanted cities, but maybe this could do

[talkaboutadate]

Thanks, amarcus, but I needed cities too.

[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.

[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!

[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?

[globalrev]

Or do some hacking...

[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.

[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.

[globalrev]

Ok I found something:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_larger_cit...