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Comment by manlio | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback! That particular post is missing because the city is written in all caps (TORONTO). I used a bunch of tricks to be able to catch as many cities as possible (say NY and NYC and Manhattan and even NEW YORK all go under "New York City"), but not every city is tested against its "all caps" equivalent atm because I wanted to be able to rebuild the db as fast as possible during development phase. I should probably fix that now.

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I used to fall for this a lot so now most string comparisons I do something like

  // string contains string against lower case / no whitespace
  cityFromList.indexOf(cityFromPost.trim.toLower())

Might help in your case too?

Unfortunately no, 1) you can't trim the whitespace if you're matching cities, 2) matching the cities lowercase opens up too many false positives. At the same time, matching every city with its uppercase equivalent doubles the time requested to build the db but only adds a tiny handful of posts. That's why (for now) I settled with a tradeoff where I catch the uppercase equivalent for the biggest cities only.

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