trouble opening database text file (not human readable)

Question

I need a text file of world cities, and the countries they belong to. I followed a previous stackoverflow question to this page: http://www.maxmind.com/app/worldcities

I downloaded the 33MB worldcitiespop.txt.gz, and unzipped it. I tried opening the resulting file (worldcitiespop.txt) using gedit and emacs. (I'm using Ubuntu 11.10). Gedit doesn't manage to open it, and on emacs I see a lot of backslashes followed by numbers, with a few letter here and there. Looking at the file's properties in nautilus says that it's plain text.

Does anyone know how I can open this file so that it's human readable?

Answer 1

I have been able to open the file by using my friend's Mac :) The issue is with the decompression of the .txt.gz file. Decompression on my machine created a decompressed file that was no bigger than the 33MB .txt.gz file. Whereas decompression on my friend's machine created a file that was 126MB.

If anyone knows why I wasn't able to decompress it on ubuntu then let me know. I used gunzip. Otherwise I'll mark the question answered

Answer 2

Works fine for me on Ubuntu 11.04:

$ wget http://www.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/worldcitiespop.txt.gz
$ gunzip worldcitiespop.txt.gz
$ ls -l worldcitiespop.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 thomas thomas 132739327 2011-05-18 00:31 worldcitiespop.txt
$ emacs -nw worldcitiespop.txt

Emacs does not know which file encoding the file is in, that's why you may see some escape sequences for non-ASCII characters. Running the following commands in the running Emacs instance should fix that:

C-x RET f utf-8 RET

M-x revert-buffer RET