GeoNames Forum

Hello,

i am having some trouble finding bulgarian cities, regions etc. when i don't write the full name. For example:
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=plovdiv&maxRows=50&style=FULL&country=BG
gives me 535 results
but if i ask the same url but instead of q=plovdiv i write q=plovdi i get 0 results
Same thing if i use the parameter name instead of q

If i write the whole name i get some results otherwise zero.
I don't get it, am i doing something wrong

?
Thank you.

Rali

Hi Rali,

There is an undocumented parameter 'name_startsWith' for this kind of query :

http://ws.geonames.org/search?name_startsWith=plovdi

Hi Christophe,

well actulally the way i asked the question if i use the parameter name_startsWith it works perfectly, but what i really wanted is a query that gives me all the matches that contain the value of the parameter, not only start with or are equal.
To be honest i thought that that is what the parameter q (or name) actually served for(since there is name_equals if i want only those equal), that's why i found it strange when at first i got 535 results and when i tried without the last letter i got 0. I thought that there is a problem with finding only the bulgarian cities but this morning i tried to do a very generic search
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=tori&maxRows=50&style=FULL&country=IT

and i got only 2 results. One for Turin and one for a mountain called Poggio Piazza dei Tori, but no city from the province of Turin(using q as a parameter i should get a search over all attributes of a place) or smaller cities that contain the word Tori in there name like Pino Torinese or Pecetto di Torino etc
It seems like it takes the parameter and tries to find a whole word that equals it. So there probably ain't no way to use the parameter to match all the words the are equal and all the words that contain it. Is that true?
Thank you very much

Rali