List of cities in HTML page

I want user to select city during filling his profile. Wha开发者_Go百科t is the best way to do it in web application?

I there any other way than just store a list of cities in my DB. Maybe some public API?

The best way to do this is with a big database, unless you want to allow the user to type in a city name.

Fortunately for you, you don't have to go out and make the database yourself. Here's a directory of free databases: http://www.sqldumpster.com/databases/geographic/

I'd just go with a simple text field with an auto-completer. You can get a list of cities but you'll have to keep it up to date and you'll have to worry about nonsense like the difference between "Saint John", "St John", and "St. John".

Sending an entire list of cities to the client will just be a user interface nightmare, a selection list would have thousands and thousands of entries and you'd have to send a lot of data to the client; there's no reason to hate your visitors that much.

The auto-completer can use the currently chosen cities to provide suggestions for new cities. If you have city names in several places, then just keep a master city list somewhere for the auto-completer and updated it with new entries every day. You will end up with a list of cities but the list will build itself.

A simple text input will work the same everywhere and just about everyone can type out the name of their city pretty easily.

You could store them in a text file, have a copy in your server (for validation), and load the cities via AJAX.

That approach will break, however, for users without JS.

And, to be snobby, can you define best? Best in what sense? Fastest? Lightest? Awesomest? Most Pythonic? I'm not sure what you mean by that.