Populating dropboxes with States and Cities

hadoob024

Hello. I'm working on my first site where I have to use PHP. Anyway, the part that I'm working on right now is where the user makes a selection in a dropdown box, and based on this selection, the next dropdown box is populated. In my case, the first dropdown box contains the names of states, and based on the state selected, the second dropdown box is populated with city names based on the state selected.

I've seen several suggestions on how to accomplish this. Basically, I'm going to populate the state dropdown box directly in my php file like so:

The suggestions I've seen for handling the city box is to store all the cities in a db where I can reference and retrieve the city based on the state selected. My question is, has anyone done this, and how well does it work? Are there better methods for performing this action?

Also, anyone know where I can get a comprehensive listing of all the cities in each of the states? I mean, worst case scenario, I could just look it up, but why re-invent the wheel. Thanks for any suggestions!

Jason_Batten

http://www.plus2net.com/php_tutorial/php_drop_down_list.php

Hope this helps 😉

hadoob024

Cool. Have you ever used this script before? I think I came across it while doing a search for help on this topic, but wasn't sure if anyone had actually used it.

Also, I guess my bigger problem is figuring out how to populate the database. If on average, I have about 50 cities per state, then I would have to create roughly 2500 INSERT INTO statements. Is this how everyone does it? Or did someone create a template for this? Thanks again.