ISO-3166 Country and Dependent Territories Lists with UN Regional Codes

These lists are the result of merging data from two sources, the Wikipedia ISO 3166-1 article for alpha and numeric country codes, and the UN Statistics site for countries' regional, and sub-regional codes. In addition to countries, it includes dependent territories.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) site provides partial data (capitalised and sometimes stripped of non-latin ornamentation), but sells the complete data set as a Microsoft Access 2003 database. Other sites give you the numeric and character codes, but there appeared to be no sites that included the associated UN-maintained regional codes in their data sets. I scraped data from the above two websites that is all publicly available already to produce some ready-to-use complete data sets that will hopefully save someone some time who had similar needs.

What's available?

The data is available in

• JSON
• XML
• CSV

3 versions exist for each format

• all.format - Everything I can find, including regional and sub-regional codes
• slim-2.format - English name, numeric country code and alpha-2 code (e.g., NZ)
• slim-3.format - English name, numeric country code and alpha-3 code (e.g., NZL)

What does it look like?

Take a peek inside the all, slim-2 and slim-3 directories for the full lists of JSON, XML and CSV.

Using JSON as an example:

all.json

[
  {
    "name":"New Zealand",
    "alpha-2":"NZ",
    "alpha-3":"NZL",
    "country-code":"554",
    "sub-region-code":"053",
    "region-code":"009",
    "iso_3166-2":"ISO 3166-2:NZ"
  },
  // ...
]

slim-2.json

[
  {
    "name":"New Zealand",
    "alpha-2":"NZ",
    "country-code":"554"
  },
  // ...
]

slim-3.json

[
  {
    "name":"New Zealand",
    "alpha-3":"NZL",
    "country-code":"554"
  },
  // ...
]

Caveats

1. Please check the data independently for accuracy before using it in any system and for any purpose
2. Although I've tried to ensure the data is as accurate as possible, the data is not authoritative, and so should not be considered accurate

scrubber.rb

scrubber.rb is a dirty Ruby script I used to generate these files. You can run it yourself if you wish to re-generate the files fresh from the sources.

To install the gems in the Gemfile:

bundle install

If you want to use a tested setup rename one of the Gemfile.lock_* files to Gemfile.lock (just choose the best one for your Ruby version) before running bundle install

To run:

ruby scrubber.rb

Note, due to file encoding issues the script should only be run using Ruby 1.9 or above.

Timestamp

• UN Statistical data retrieved 20 April 2014, from a document last revised 31 October 2013
• Wikipedia data retrieved 20 April 2014, from a document last revised 14 April 2014

Revisions

• 20 April 2014 - tag 3.0
• 13 June 2012 - tag 2.0
• 18 May 2011 - tag 1.0