# Common Targeting Syntax Mistakes

### Intro

This article will explain how to adhere to correct proxy targeting syntax and avoid common mistakes when doing so.

Most of GoProxies syntax follows this rule: dashes for starting the flag, dash for what you’re targeting, and underscores for specification and titles with more than one word.

### Country

You simply need to add a `country-<countryName>` tag to your proxy commands to target countries.  For example, to target USA you add country-us , so it would look like this:

`curl --proxytunnel --proxy "https://customer-USERNAME-country-us:PASSWORD@proxy.goproxies.com:1080" https://ip.goproxies.com`

All country abbreviations are the same as per ip2location website, You can easily retrieve these abbreviations here under each country, specified under  ISO-3166-1 Alpha-2: <https://www.ip2location.com/country-list>

### State/Province

To target a state or a province, you need to declare a `state` flag, then add the country, e.g `state-us` and state name itself preceded by an underscore, e.g `state-us_california`

For example, to target a us state:\
\
`state-us_florida`

Similarily for provinces or regions, lets say Ontario province in Canada:

`state-ca_ontario`

### City

You don’t need to chain a whole list of flags to target a specific city. All cities in our database come with the country information added to them.&#x20;

If, for example, you’d like to target Berlin in Germany, you would need a `city-de_berlin`,

or for Los Angeles, USA it would be `city-us_los_angeles`.

Full cURL example:

`curl --proxytunnel --proxy "https://customer-USERNAME-city-us_los_angeles:PASSWORD@proxy.goproxies.com:1080" https://ip.goproxies.com`

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