What's the best way to lookup the US county a US city resides in?

geolocation geocoding geo
Cucumber2 picture Cucumber2 · Jul 5, 2011 · Viewed 16.8k times · Source

I'm looking for the best/easiest way to programmatically grab the name of the US county a given US city resides in. It doesn't seem there's a straightforward API available for such a (seemingly simple) task?

Answer

Paul Sasik picture Paul Sasik · Jul 5, 2011

You can download a freely-available database of county/city/zip code info such as this one: http://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/zip-code-database/ (no need to register or pay)

Import it whole, or a subsection of it, into a local, persistent data store (such as a database) and query it whenever you need to look up a city's county

Note: County info has disappeared from the originally-linked .csv file since this answer was posted. This link no longer contains county information: http://federalgovernmentzipcodes.us/free-zipcode-database.csv

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