[Bug]: Population field stored as string type, but documentation says integer

[swkim0911]

Issue Type

Incorrect Data (wrong information)

Location (if applicable)

State

What's wrong?

According to the CONTRIBUTING.md:

the documentation states that the population field is expected to be of integer type.

However, based on my review of both the JSON files and the MongoDB dump,
the population field appears to be stored as a string rather than an integer.

This discrepancy seems to occur only in the states dataset.

Example from states.json:

{
        "id": 3875,
        "name": "Baghlan",
        "country_id": 1,
        "country_code": "AF",
        "country_name": "Afghanistan",
        "iso2": "BGL",
        "iso3166_2": "AF-BGL",
        "fips_code": "03",
        "type": "province",
        "level": null,
        "parent_id": null,
        "native": "بغلان",
        "latitude": "36.17890260",
        "longitude": "68.74530640",
        "timezone": "Asia\/Kabul",
        "translations": {
            "br": "Baghlan",
            "ko": "바글란",
            "pt-BR": "Baghlan",
            "pt": "Baghlan",
            "nl": "Baghlan",
            "hr": "Baghlan",
            "fa": "بغلان",
            "de": "Baghlan",
            "es": "Baghlan",
            "fr": "Baghlan",
            "ja": "バグラン",
            "it": "Baghlan",
            "zh-CN": "巴格兰",
            "tr": "Baghlan",
            "ru": "Баглан",
            "uk": "Баглан",
            "pl": "Baghlan",
            "hi": "बघ्लन",
            "ar": "بغلان"
        },
        "wikiDataId": "Q170309",
        "population": "119607" <- should be integer type
    },

What should it be?

The population field should be exported as an integer value rather than a string, in accordance with the documented schema.

Source (optional)

No response

[dosubot]

Hi @swkim0911! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the countries-states-cities-database team.

The population field in the states dataset is exported as a string because the export scripts copy it directly from the database, where it is stored as a varchar (text) type, without converting it to an integer. This contradicts the documented schema, which expects an integer value.

To resolve this, update the export scripts (for both JSON and MongoDB) to cast the population field to integer when exporting states data. For example, in the PHP export script, change the assignment from:

$statesArray[$i]['population'] = $state['population'];

to:

$statesArray[$i]['population'] = $state['population'] !== null ? (int)$state['population'] : null;

This will ensure the exported population field matches the documented integer type. You can see how this is already handled for countries in the same script, where population is explicitly cast to integer (source).

No existing issues or pull requests currently address this specific type mismatch for states. Updating the exporter will align the output with the documentation and improve data consistency.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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