Is there any readily available snippet that has all the countries, states and cities for showing in a drop down in html for selection?
What is standard for this? Does everyone roll their own?
The snippet can be in html, javascript, jquery plugin.
NOTE: I know how to make chained dropdown. I'm more concerned with the data rather than technique.
Here is the data for free - Good luck getting 33MB presented in a drop down ;)
Seems they also have a JavaScript API - (found via Best way to get user nearest city? Python/Django) to start you off with the user's (IP) location
In the foreseeable future there may be a JSON interface according to Peter Saczkowski
Operations Manager | Maxmind, Inc.:
Yes, we are actually considering switching over to JSON, but don't
have a timeline quite on when that will happen. If/when this happens,
we'll have updates in our newsletter and on the site.
Disclaimer I'm not affiliated with MaxMind and the themselves suggest to also look at GeoNames
Product Summary: Includes city, region, country, latitude and
longitude. This product doesn't contain any IP addresses. It's simply
a listing of all the cities in the world. For IP to city mappings, see
our MaxMind City product.
Note that this product is now a free download [33 MB]. The database
will be updated about once per year, since the city data doesn't
change that frequently. [license]
The database uses toponymic information, based on the Geographic Names
Data Base, containing official standard names approved by the United
States Board on Geographic Names and maintained by the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. More information is available at the
Maps and Geodata link at www.nga.mil. The National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency name, initials, and seal are protected
by 10 United States Code Section 445.
It also uses free population data © by Stefan Helders
www.world-gazetteer.com. Visit his website to download the free
population data. Our database combines Stefan's population data with
the list of all cities in the world.
Another free cities database is available from GeoNames.
Includes the following fields:
Country Code
ASCII City Name
City Name
State/Region
Population
Latitude
Longitude
Timezone data is available through an external lookup
Approximately 2,710,000 records.
Database Fields
Field Data Type Field Description
Country Code char(2) ISO 3166 Country Code,
ASCII City Name varchar(100) Name of city or town in ASCII encoding
City Name varchar(255) Name of city or town in ISO-8859-1 encoding. A list of cities contained in GeoIP City is available.
State/Region char(2) For US, ISO-3166-2 code for the state/province name. Outside of the US, FIPS 10-4 code
Population unsigned int Population of city (available for over 33,000 major cities only)
Latitude numeric (float) Latitude of city where IP is located
Longitude numeric (float) Longitude of city where IP is located
