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I am trying to get a number of populated places for example for Andorra since it is a small number. Here is a geonames site with 10 places:

http://www.geonames.org/AD/largest-cities-in-andorra.html

But if I do this query:

http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=PPL&username=genadinik&country=AD&style=full&maxRows=100

Only 4 out of the results have population. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a more accurate way of getting populated cities there?

Thanks!

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The Data is only available for a few towns and cities - even Wolfram|Alpha is limited wolframalpha.com/entities/countries/andorra/xy/p0/k6 – Mapperz♦ Jun 23 '11 at 4:44

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

The population count is simply not in the database (even though it is listed as a "populated place"). When no population count is available, you can see the XML tag:

<population/>

For example, see the edit form for Sant Joan de Caselles: GeoNames

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thanks - is there maybe a better place to get populations of populated places? – Genadinik Jun 23 '11 at 3:58
This could be difficult to track down for remote pockets of the world – Mike Toews Jun 23 '11 at 4:12
Actually I just realized my query could be wrong as it didn't even retrieve some of the biggest cities in Andorra. So something bigger is out of whack. Could I do something with the query to make it more correct and actually get Andorra cities like Santa Coloma and Saint Julia. – Genadinik Jun 23 '11 at 4:19
I'm not sure how to ORDER BY population using the web API, except to download a snapshot and load it to a local database to perform a specific query. – Mike Toews Jun 23 '11 at 4:31
unless Andorra has a census of population and publishes the results there is probably no way to get this information. My guess would be they use a register of population instead of a census. – iant♦ Jun 23 '11 at 15:04
up vote 3 down vote

If you need populations by town in Andorra you can get them from http://www.estadistica.ad/serveiestudis/web/banc_dades4.asp?lang=4&codi_tema=2&codi_divisio=16&codi_subtemes=8 which I found by examining the footnotes on the Andorra Wikipedia page.

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