Countries

Countries is a collection of all sorts of useful information for every country in the ISO 3166 standard. It contains info for the following standards ISO3166-1(countries), ISO3166-2(states/subdivisions), ISO4217(currency) and E.164(phone numbers). The gem also adds a country_select helper. I will add any country based data I can get access to. I hope this to be a repository for all country based information.

Warning!

The data in this gem is collected from many different sources including CommonDataHub and represents a best effort to be accurate and up to date. It is used at your own risk.

Installation

Countries is hosted on GemCutter, so simply run the following:

gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org
sudo gem install countries

Use It!

Simply load a new country object using Country.new(alpha2) or the shortcut Country[alpha2]. An example works best.

c = Country.new('US')
c = Country['US']

Then you have all sorts of methods on the Country object to give you info about the country.

c.number # ISO3166 numeric country code
c.alpha2 # ISO3166 alpha2 country code
c.alpha3 # ISO3166 alpha2 country code
c.name # ISO3166 name
c.names # ISO3166 alternate names
c.latitude # uuuh the latitude
c.longitude # obvious?
c.region # UN Region
c.subregion # UN SubRegion
c.country_code # E.164 Country Code
c.national_destination_code_lengths # E.164 length of national destination code
c.national_number_lengths # E.164 length of the national number
c.international_prefix # E.164 code for dialing international from country
c.national_prefix # E164 code for dialing within the country
c.subdivisions # All ISO3166-2 for that country with there codes

The currency method returns a hash of ISO4217 information.

c.currency['code'] => 'USD'
c.currency['name'] => 'Dollars'
c.currency['symbol'] => '$'
c.currency['unicode_hex'] => 36 # Returns a FixNum. Do .to_s(16) to get hex value
c.currency['unicode_hex'].to_s(16) => '24'
c.currency['alt_currency'] => nil # Will return a second currency hash for countries with an alternate currency.

A template for formatting addresses is available through the address_format method.

c.address_format => "{{recipient}}\n{{street}}\n{{city}} {{region}} {{postalcode}}\n{{country}}"

As a bonus if you add the gem to a rails project it automatically gives you a country_select form helper. Unlike the normal country select it will store the alpha2 country code not the country name.

ToDo

search/indexing

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.