Is there a centralized list of country names that can be used for web drop down boxes (and validation) [closed]

Answer 1

I don't know what IIS is, but ISO 3166 specifies 2-letter codes for each country; AFAIK, their list is comprehensive. ISO 3166 site

Answer 2

I have a recent list ready to go on my website at http://www.john.geek.nz/index.php/2009/01/sql-tips-list-of-countries/

It's both at sql and tab delimited - The original list was sourced from wikipedia

Answer 3

We maintain a list of 'PUBLIC DOMAIN' Worldwide Country names in all official formats. The information comes from the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency for offical English and French short names, the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN) for english short, long and local short, long names, and United Nations Group of Experts on Geographic Names (UNGEGN) format (long) English, French names, short and formal local names and Spanish names.

There still is a problem representing some Arabic characters as romanized characters (will see ?). But these are limited to the local names of a few Arab countries.

Note, the English, Spanish and French cover the 3 Western languages of the UN's official 6 languages. Metadata, information on the sources, and download can be found at:

http://www.opengeocode.org/download.php#countrynames

The Open Geocode Team OpenGeoCode.org

Jan. 26, 2014. We updated the list to include country names in Italian and German. We used the UN Food & Agriculture list of countries in Italian and the German Government's Federal Foreign Office's list of countries in German.

Answer 4

Much, much easier is to use a web service for this task rather than holding your own data store. This way its updated and you can do things like have country-state ajax dropdown sets. http://geodata.solutions is the best one to use, and it has lots of cools stuff like being able to pre-select the user's country based on their IP, and ordering lists by their population.

Answer 5

I've posted a few files to github:gist

Including:

The HTML Select enumerations for the Alpha-2, Alpha-3, and Numeric-3 values, as well as an XSD snippet of those values as enumerations for a simple type restriction.

Check on this link

Answer 6

The CIA world fact book has this information, however, just as you point out in your question there are some disputed countries that are not on their list sometimes, ie. Palestine.

Another source for country names is Natural Earth Data and their cultural map download links which come as shape files ready to be plotted as maps. Here is a direct link to the medium quality map data download page.