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

You could get the 2 largest cities in each country from here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_and_second_largest_cities_by_country" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_and_seco...</a><p>Or this has the capital and cities larger than the capital: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_largest_cities_by_country" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_largest_ci...</a>

Javascript code that displays a drop down of Coutry and State: <a href="http://javascript.internet.com/forms/country-state-drop-down.html" rel="nofollow">http://javascript.internet.com/forms/country-state-drop-down...</a><p>I know you wanted cities, but maybe this could do

You could use MONDIAL. <a href="http://www.dbis.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/Mondial/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dbis.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/Mondial/</a><p>The database is pretty extensive, but you should only need to query it once to get what you need.

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!

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries</a> ?<p>And then about eight hours' work to look up and type in the names of all the major cities in each country?

Did you look at GeoNames? <a href="http://www.geonames.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.geonames.org/</a><p>It would require you to do some parsing to filter what you need but the info is there.

Ok I found something:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_larger_cities_by_country" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capitals_and_larger_cit...</a>