Searching towns

[ronnyd8719]

Hi I am new to the forum. I use HTML most of the time. I am learning PHP and MYSQL. Anyway I am trying to give a city name and it will give you cities or towns in a 50 mile area. Can this be done in anyway. I am willing to learn new code. Let me know the type of code and I will get the books. If you know good books to learn code let me know. I am trying to broaden my mine.
Thanks and nice forum

[Boogle]

didn't see this before the last one!

Yes that is easily doable, what you're asking. However i'm not a PHP'er but the general idea for the database would be to create it as if you were plotting the cities/towns on a graph- so each town/city would be distance x away from the origin. and grid out this graph so each city would go in a grid reference, just a numbered block really.
then if someone searched for a city in block B, you would select all cities/towns in block B and the ones which were less than 50 miles difference away from point o (the origin) you would spit out to the client.

That's just the general idea- it will need tweaking but i'm pretty sure that would work. Also if you're new to SQL you might to read this

HTH's

Boog's