World Gazetteer

Download compressed file

The downloadable file contains a list of all towns, administrative divisions and agglomerations with their current population, their English name (if not equal to the international name) and parent country. The international names are displayed in UTF-8 format, which means that special characters which are not displayable with a normal text editor, are displayed as two characters. A freeware text editor that can read UTF-8 characters is UniRed. When opening the file with UniRed you have to specify the charset UTF-8.

download file (5.3 MB)

Structure of the file

The file contains the listed fields. If data is missing or does not match the geographical entity (e.g. the geolocations for administrative divisions) the fields remain empty.

• Unique identification number of the geographical object
• name of the geographical entity (english name, if available)
• alternative names
• original names in greek, cyrillic or arabic
• type of geografical object (e.g. country, locality etc)
• current population
• latitude (for places)
• longitude (for places)
• parent country
• parent administrative division of first level
• parent administrative division of second level
• parent administrative division of third level

Importing data to Excel

Since Excel does not understand the UTF-8 format, there is an Excel script that transforms the characters into the appropriate format. The following steps are necessary:

• extract the utf8.xls from utf8.zip with an unzip program
• open utf8.xls. Be sure to activate macros
• open the unzipped data file in a text editor
• copy and paste a part from the file into Excel (Excel cannot process more than 65536 lines)
• mark the complete sheet with ctrl+a
• select the font "Lucida Sans Unicode"
• press ctrl+w to apply the macro (should take about a minute depending on your computer; if ctrl+w does not work, press alt+f8 and then execute the macro 'utf8')

download utf8 Excel macro (16k)

note: The macro also works for most country files of the Geonet Names Server (except for some exotic characters as e.g. in the Vietnam file)