How to convert a country string to its ISO 3166-1 code using Zend?

Question

Does anybody know if it's possible to use Zend_Locale to get the ISO 3166-1 code for a country if you have the country name as a string? For example I have "Nederland" so I would like to get "NL".

Answer 1

You should have a look at Zend_Locale::getTranslation(). You may get a list (a simple array) of country names - and then you may use array_search() to get the needed "country-key"!

Answer 2

I don't know if Zend has something for that, but it's fairly easy to do on your own.

This tutorial shows how you can grab the latest list of ISO 3166-1 country codes in XML format, parse it, and then create a PHP file that can be included when you need a country code translation array:

$str = file_get_contents('http://opencountrycodes.appspot.com/xml/');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($str);
$out = '$countries'." = array(\n";
foreach ($xml->country as $country)
{
    $out .= "'{$country['code']}' => \"{$country['name']}\",\n";
}
$out .= ");";

file_put_contents('country_names.php', $out);

Alternately, you can save it as a CSV file and load it using PHP's fgetcsv() function. That would probably be preferable IMO. Or, heck, you could just save the XML and parse it when you load it.

Answer 3

I'm not sure how within Zend HTTp calls can be made, but here is probably a good resource to refer.

Use Yahoo!'s Geo data, which allows mapping of free form strings into WOE Ids. For countries, WOE Ids are the ISO 3166-1 codes.

To convert a free form string into a WOE Id, you can use the GeoPlanet APIs : http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/

Answer 4

I have made an up-to-date collection of countrynames and ISO 3166 country codes over at:

https://github.com/johannesl/Internationalization

You can use it to convert both name => country code and reverse.

I'm also creating a collection of common country aliases that will appear on github.