Alpha Search drop down field

[yurkoon]

Does anyone know how to do an "alpha search" in PHP or MySQL? Basically I have a a table with 60,00 city names in it. On the front en the user would start typing into this field to find the city they are looking for, the more they type the closer the match would fill in in the field.

A traditional dropdown menu would be out of the question due to the shear number of records. Also my client wants it this way so no matter what I say it won't help!!

Any ideas would be helpful.

Thanks

[AstroTeg]

This is a client-side problem. Your choices would be JavaScript which I have a feeling would be either cumbersome to implement or cumbersome for the browser to download and run.

Another thought might be something like Flash. I'm not a huge fan of Flash, but this might be a good task for it.

I think XUL has some type ahead stuff built in, but XUL will only work with Gecko based browsers which might not be what you need.

[yurkoon]

Thanks,

I will give the Flash solution a try.