Populate country list with respective two letter and three letter code in c#

Question

Can any one please help in populating the list of country names, its respective two letter code and three letter codes.. I tried the below snippet, but its giving me incomplete results.

 static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        List<string> list = new List<string>();
        foreach (CultureInfo ci in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.AllCultures & ~CultureTypes.NeutralCultures))
        {
            try
            {
                RegionInfo myRI1 = new RegionInfo(ci.LCID);
                list.Add(String.Format("{0,-12}{1,-12}{2}", myRI1.TwoLetterISORegionName, myRI1.EnglishName, myRI1.ThreeLetterISORegionName));
            }
            catch { }
       }

    list.Sort();  // sort by name
        // write to console
    foreach (string str in list)
        Console.WriteLine(str);

    Console.WriteLine("Total Countries" + list.Count.ToString());
    Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

Before I take a closer look: what do you mean by "incomplete results"? — D.R., Jul 30 '13 at 12:52
Your [code](http://ideone.com/4WJsRu) clearly shows there is an issue loading the `RegionInfo` from the `CultureInfo` being returned by `GetCultures(CultureTypes.AllCultures & ~CultureTypes.NeutralCultures))`. You should step through your loop and see why it's returning empty `RegionInfo`, generally it's better practise to use `CultureTypes.SpecificCultures`. — James, Jul 30 '13 at 13:07
You should also remove that nasty `try...catch` if any exceptions are thrown you won't know about them. — Jay, Jul 30 '13 at 13:27
As per the above snippet, it does not give me the list of all the countries, some are repeated, and the total count of the list is only 210. I think, this is because i have used the regioninfo to extract the list. — Rithesh Krishnan, Jul 31 '13 at 03:13

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 30 '13 at 13:24

If you really must retrieve this information using C#, this is how I'd do it:

var regions = CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.AllCultures)
    .Where(c => !c.IsNeutralCulture && c.LCID != 0x7f)
    .Select(c => new RegionInfo(c.LCID))
    .GroupBy(r => r.TwoLetterISORegionName) // This is an alternative to using Distinct
    .Select(g => g.First())                 // It's probably not very efficient, but the list is so small anyway.
    .OrderBy(r => r.TwoLetterISORegionName)
    .ToList();

(The culture with the LCID 0x7f is the InvariantCulture, which doesn't have an associated RegionInfo.)

This gives only 127 countries on my computer. Your method gives a lot more results because there are many instances of multiple CultureInfos that share the same RegionInfo. For instance, there are four different CultureInfos that point to the RegionInfo for Spain: ca-ES (Catalan), eu-ES (Basque), gl-ES (Galician) and es-ES (Spanish). This is because CultureInfo is primarily concerned with languages, and languages and regions don't need to match up.

There are way more than 127 countries in the world. The problem is that approaching this by using CultureInfo and RegionInfo can only ever tell you about the countries that your computer happens to know about, which is unlikely to be a complete list. What's more, as the name RegionInfo suggests, they aren't necessarily even countries or nations. For example, one of the RegionInfo entries on my computer is "Caribbean", with a TwoLetterISORegionName of 029 (which I have to admit is rather strange). The Caribbean is clearly not a country.

A better way to solve your problem is to look up a list of countries elsewhere, like, say, here and store them in a table somewhere in your program.

Populate country list with respective two letter and three letter code in c#

1 Answers1