[geeks] City & Province -> Lat/Long?

[geeks at sunhelp.org]

This is part of what my company does for a living.

Are you a competitor?

btw, this sort of info is available in very good detail from several
companies and the fed gov (Canadian gov too).

James Fogg, Network Engineer
Vicinity Corporation - New Hampshire
(603) 442-1751

~ -----Original Message-----
~ From: Dave Kimmel [mailto:crisco_kid at shaw.ca]
~ Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2002 1:02 PM
~ To: geeks at sunhelp.org
~ Subject: [geeks] City & Province -> Lat/Long?
~ 
~ 
~ I've been given an interesting (read: tedious) task at work 
~ which involves
~ finding all of the records where the address is within a given
~ geographical area.
~ 
~ So far I've reduced this to a simple, but tedious, excercise 
~ by getting a
~ list of cities out of the database, using Excel to generate a URL to
~ MapQuest that'll show me the city on the map at a decent zoom level.
~ Then I can click on each link and delete the city if it isn't 
~ in the area
~ or leave it if it is.  I plan on taking the list of cities 
~ and making an
~ SQL statement out of them for the final list.
~ 
~ I got to thinking that there must be a better way though.  So 
~ my idea of a
~ better way is to get the lat/long coordinates of the rough 
~ centre of each
~ city and build a table in the database out of them.  Then I 
~ can work some
~ magic and have it show me all the records where the lat/long are in
~ whatever range I need.
~ 
~ So, does anyone know of anything that I can feed a city, province, and
~ country to and get a lat/long pair back?
~ 
~ Thanks!
~ -- Dave Kimmel
~    crisco_kid at shaw.ca
~ _______________________________________________
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~