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Comment by delta_p_delta_x | Hacker News Reader

> City not found. Make sure you use the format: City, Country (Paris, France)

It might be good to rework this—cities only, and provide a drop-down box for users to select. Having city, country is a bit superfluous for people who live in city-states.

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I'm afraid there are... 1,700+ cities[0] in the world called "San José"

That's quite a bit of scrolling you'd be forcing those people to do.

[0]: https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-pedia/what-is-the-most-comm...

See reply below.

Your reply says

> I meant a text box that users could type in, and a drop-down that returned filtered results from the input.

That's what I'm objecting to.

If I type in "San Jose", are you going to show me 1,700 "San Jose" lines where I'm supposed to find the right one?

You want a dropdown listing every city in the world?

I meant a text box that users could type in, and a drop-down that returned filtered results from the input.

Yes, that is the standard UI for this problem. You select a country, then that loads a the country's divisions ilfor another select box, and that load the cities for that division.

Another way is auto complete for the city with just country preselected.

I see that UI on some European sites. It’s basically nonfunctional for the US, at least. (Especially the latter approach with no “division” narrowing.) There are hundreds of towns with duplicate names, people might want to use region names that don’t exist politically (“Bay Area”), and people can be in incorporated towns (San Francisco) or unincorporated areas that get assigned Census Bureau names based on usage (Bay Point). There is just no way to create an autocomplete list that encompasses every valid place, and it’s a waste of time to try.

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