GeoNames Forum

I had much better luck using the mysqlimport tool.

mysqlimport -h host -u username -ppassword --fields-terminated-by='\t' --lines-terminated-by='\n' --columns='geonameid, name, ansiname, alternames, latitude, longitude, feature_class, feature_code, country_code, cc2, admin1_code, admin2_code, population, elevation, gtopo30, timezone, modification_date' --local database /path/geonames.txt

Use ftp or wget on the server to grab the dump file, upload it to your server, uncompress and rename to match your table.

Replace the following with your info:
host
username
password (no space between the -p option and password)
database
/path/geonames.txt (path to your file on server)

Important: double check via phpmyadmin that both the collation of the whole database and the table is set to "utf8_general_ci" via the "operations" tab before you import.

I'm using utf8_encode in php to encode strings. It works fine most of the time but I'm getting the occasional odd results like the following when searching for Ryūō Japan...

http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_equals=Ry%u016B%u014D&country=JP&fcode=ppl&fcode=pplc&fcode=ppla&style=full

<status message="missing parameter" value="12"/>