: Where do you get data to populate a suggest-box with Country, State, City and Zip Information? I'm trying to create some dialogs in my web-app that can auto-suggest possible Countries, States,

@Chiappetta492

It seems like you want a valid, accurate address from the user. Each country varies widely, but in the USA, the USPS maintains a current database of valid addresses, and everything you can possibly imagine about them. Vendors of proper address verification products (that can validate and standardize wrong/incomplete addresses) are CASS-Certified by the USPS.

There are a few options for doing what you want to do. The easiest of all, and most affordable (even free) is an address validation API. I work at a company called SmartyStreets which offers such an API called LiveAddress. There's a simple Javascript implementation you can just copy+paste into your website. As the user submits the form, they'll be prompted to choose a valid address based on what they typed. I am sure this will be of some use to you.

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@Sims2060225

This blog post on a Coldfusion blog explains one implementation of what I think you're trying to do. It's pretty straight forward:


He found a cheap paid (regularly updated) source that provides their app with up-to-date city/zip/state/geo-coordinate records and imported it into an SQL database.
He created a user-defined function that would measure the distance between two sets of long/lat coordinates.
Then use the UDF to perform queries to find locations within a particular distance or check the distance between two locations.

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@Vandalay111

One source is MaxMind. I haven't looked at their data, so I can comment on how good it is.

You will still need to make a decision about what to do if the exising, real-world city is not in your database.

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