|
Geography::Countries -- 2-letter, 3-letter, and numerical codes for countries. |
Geography::Countries -- 2-letter, 3-letter, and numerical codes for countries.
use Geography::Countries;
$country = country 'DE'; # 'Germany'
@list = country 666; # ('PM', 'SPM', 666,
# 'Saint Pierre and Miquelon', 1)
This module maps country names, and their 2-letter, 3-letter and numerical codes, as defined by the ISO-3166 maintenance agency [1], and defined by the UNSD.
country subroutine.This subroutine is exported by default. It takes a 2-letter, 3-letter or numerical code, or a country name as argument. In scalar context, it will return the country name, in list context, it will return a list consisting of the 2-letter code, the 3-letter code, the numerical code, the country name, and a flag, which is explained below. Note that not all countries have all 3 codes; if a code is unknown, the undefined value is returned.
There are 3 categories of countries. The largest category are the
current countries. Then there is a small set of countries that no
longer exist. The final set consists of areas consisting of multiple
countries, like Africa. No 2-letter or 3-letter codes are available
for the second two sets. (ISO 3166-3 [3] defines 4 letter codes for the
set of countries that no longer exist, but the author of this module
was unable to get her hands on that standard.) By default, country
only returns countries from the first set, but this can be changed
by giving country an optional second argument.
The module optionally exports the constants CNT_F_REGULAR,
CNT_F_OLD, CNT_F_REGION and CNT_F_ANY. These constants can also
be important all at once by using the tag :FLAGS. CNT_F_ANY is just
the binary or of the three other flags. The second argument of country
should be the binary or of a subset of the flags CNT_F_REGULAR,
CNT_F_OLD, and CNT_F_REGION - if no, or a false, second argument is
given, CNT_F_REGULAR is assumed. If CNT_F_REGULAR is set, regular
(current) countries will be returned; if CNT_F_OLD is set, old,
no longer existing, countries will be returned, while CNT_F_REGION
is used in case a region (not necessarely) a country might be returned.
If country is used in list context, the fifth returned element is
one of CNT_F_REGULAR, CNT_F_OLD and CNT_F_REGION, indicating
whether the result is a regular country, an old country, or a region.
In list context, country returns a 5 element list. To avoid having
to remember which element is in which index, the constants CNT_I_CODE2,
CNT_I_CODE3, CNT_I_NUMCODE, CNT_I_COUNTRY and CNT_I_FLAG
can be imported. Those constants contain the indices of the 2-letter code,
the 3-letter code, the numerical code, the country, and the flag explained
above, respectively. All index constants can be imported by using the
:INDICES tag.
code2, code3, numcode and countries routines.All known 2-letter codes, 3-letter codes, numerical codes and country
names can be returned by the routines code2, code3, numcode and
countries. None of these methods is exported by default; all need to
be imported if one wants to use them. The tag :LISTS imports them
all. In scalar context, the number of known codes or countries is returned.
The 2-letter codes come from the ISO 3166-1:1997 standard [2]. ISO 3166 bases its list of country names on the list of names published by the United Nations. This list is published by the Statistical Division of the United Nations [4]. The UNSD uses 3-letter codes, and numerical codes [5]. The information about old countries [6] and regions [7] also comes from the United Nations.
In a few cases, there was a conflict between the way how the United Nations spelled a name, and how ISO 3166 spells it. In most cases, is was word order (for instance whether The republic of should preceed the name, or come after the name. A few cases had minor spelling variations. In all such cases, the method in which the UN spelled the name was choosen; ISO 3166 claims to take the names from the UN, so we consider the UN authoritative.
Looking up information using country names is far from perfect. Except for case and the amount of white space, the exact name as it appears on the list has to be given. USA will not return anything, but United States will.
$Log: Countries.pm,v $
Revision 1.4 2003/01/26 18:19:07 abigail
Changed license, email address. Added installation section.
Revision 1.3 2003/01/26 18:12:10 abigail
Removed INIT{} from initializing code, as the INIT{} isn't run
when doing 'require'.
Revision 1.2 2000/09/05 18:22:01 abigail
Changed typo in "Federal Republic of Germany" (Dan Allen)
Changed layout of test.pl
Revision 1.1 1999/09/15 07:27:22 abigail
Initial revision
This package was written by Abigail, geometry-countries@abigail.nl
This package is copyright 1999-2003 by Abigail.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ``Software''), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
To install this module type the following:
perl Makefile.PL make make test make install
|
Geography::Countries -- 2-letter, 3-letter, and numerical codes for countries. |