Is there a convenient way to get a hash or array of countries and their corresponding codes?

[barmstrong]

I'm trying to build a select menu for the user to choose their country, and auto-populate the country code.

Couldn't see an easy way to get a hash or array of these values though to build the select. Any ideas? Thanks for the great gem btw.

[floere]

Hi Brian,

Thanks, and thanks for the issue. I am not sure what you exactly need. Is it the names of the countries, mapped to country codes, or "Switzerland (+41)", or just the country code itself in the select ("41")?

Cheers,
Florian

[barmstrong]

Yep best would be country names mapped to codes like {"Switzerland" => 41, "United States" => 1} etc. But anything close to that I could probably make it work.

[floere]

At the moment, Phony does not save any country names, since the focus is only on the numbers themselves. I did consider it, but including the names would bring with it a whole host of issues (multi-language names etc.).

Are there any country gems that have this mapping ready? (Maybe the "countries" gem?) If not, maybe we can work something out, perhaps a 3166 to country code mapping, to be required separately in Phony.

[barmstrong]

The countries gem has a country_select. It looks like you can get the country names mapped to country code with ISO3166::Country::Names. Their yaml file has the country_codes also, I'll see if I can find a way to pull the hash I need out of it tomorrow. Thanks @floere !

[floere]

Hi Brian,

Glad to hear it! I'll think about doing a built-in solution.

Cheers,
Florian

[barmstrong]

Hey, I figured it out with the countries gem. You can do:

ISO3166::Country::Data.collect{|k,v| [v['name'], v['country_code']]}.sort

Since it's semi-expensive I cached it in a helper:

def cached_country_codes
  Rails.cache.fetch('cached_country_codes', expires_in: 1.hour) do
    ISO3166::Country::Data.collect{|k,v| [v['name'], v['country_code']]}.sort
  end
end

Then you can call:

<%= f.select :country_code, options_for_select(cached_country_codes) %>

[floere]

Great! I wonder about the expires_in – do countries change every hour? ;) But seriously: Good stuff! Cheers

[barmstrong]

Thanks! You're right, prob a bit overkill :)