jQuery City Picker?

Question

I'm looking for a city-picker like the one facebook uses on the create-an-event page. The user should be able to type the name of a city, and it will pop up with the state/province which they can select.

I think this would the easiest way to allow users to choose a city? Either that, or we'd need drill-down select boxes which first let you choose the country, then province, then the cities can be loaded... but I think that'll be too slow.

This will be used internally for our staff to quickly enter information taken over the phone. The city must be a valid one, recognized by our database. I don't know if I should force the input box into a very specific recognized format, like <city-name><comma><single-space><two-letter-province-code> which would then be parsed and looked up in the DB, or the user can pick something when the pop-up appears with city names, and then after they pick one some hidden field will be populated with the city-id. Which would give me the least headache?

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I think the city-picker goes slightly beyond a typical auto-complete widget in that what's displayed in the drop-down isn't exactly the same as what gets copied into the textbox. For example, the drop-down might show the country as well, but it isn't really necessary to display this in the box. Is there a widget that supports this too?

Answer 1

first of all you have to find database to work with I can recommend you this data source as far it is largest database available.

Regarding JavaScript and auto complete you can find many ready made scripts here