>The problem here is that there is no lookup or validation table for cities - can't be, too many cities, towns, or villages all over the world - and the user can write anything. Michel could merge that information, and it might indeed be a good idea to do so. But new members will continue to write just about anything (others might write "S.P.", "S.P", "SP", "S.Paulo", or "S. Paulo" for example).

Once upon a time, when I was writing my first app, I wanted to have a zip lookup - which wouldn't be too big, because it was about housing, so it would cover an area of maybe 100km across. Boss talked me out of it - it's your first, this is M$ Cobol, just don't make things more complicated than they must be. OK... the operators had to type the name of the place for every new member. Which they abbreviated, of course, but everything was fine as long as anyone could understand what it is when shown or printed.

Few years later the operation grew too big, so they decided to divide it into smaller regions - and would I please divide the membership by place?

The time it took me to do this was roughly equal to the time it would have taken me to have a lookup table. One particular place, Srpska Crnja, was spelled (in uppercase only!) about ten different ways - "Sr. Crnja", "Sr.Crnja" (spaceless!), "S. Crnja", "S Crnja" (dot, no dot) etc etc. There were others, too. But what took the cake (and I'm still angry at myself for forgetting to take a picture when I could have) is a huge roadsign in Bašaid, sized about 3x5m, with lots of room to show the exact layout of the crossroads, where the road to Crnja is to the right, and the lettering was a bit miscalculated, so they managed by abbreviating it... slightly: "Srpska Crnj.".