[thelist] Country List needed

Paul Cowan paul at wishlist.com.au
Tue Jan 15 16:08:21 CST 2002


Hey all,

Thanks for all your help. I have decided that the only way to avoid some of 
the problems discussed is to run with standards (hooray!). I'm using ISO 
3166 as the basic list of which countries to include -- "your country isn't 
on the list? Sorry mate, take it up with ISO..."

As for the regions, and the touchy political issues such as John 
mentioned (e.g. Turkey's one thing.. what about Cyprus?), I managed 
to find a delightful document at the UN Statistics Division website, 
entitled "Composition of macro geographical (continental) regions 
and component geographical regions", at:
	http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/methods/m49regin.htm 
(beware: HORRIBLY formatted HTML)

Combining this with the ISO3166 list, I produced a master list, and 
we'll use that -- "you don't think Turkey is part of 'Western Asia'? 
Sorry mate, take it up with the UN..."

For the convenience of any evolters who would like this list for 
future reference, I have placed the regional hierarchy from the UN, 
nicely formatted, at 
	http://www.knowshit.com/tools/countries/countries-hierarchy.txt

And, for the version being used to populate our database (tab-delimited 
flat text file, matching each country to its one-level-up parent 
region, including ISO3166 2-letter and 3-letter codes):
	http://www.knowshit.com/tools/countries/countries-flat.txt

As for what Marc said about using the costs themselves -- ha! would that
it were that easy... because we can be shipping any number of items with
any number of couriers (some couriers are cheaper for some size/shape/weight
parcels, etc.), we can't really use their zones. Their zones are too broad,
and of course courier A's zones won't match with courier B. So by getting
a fairly fine-grained list, we can tweak the costs a little more -- what
we call "Western Asia" might be "Middle East" to courier A and "Asia" to
courier B -- but if the groups are small enough, we can fiddle with it a
bit, and if they're a bit out here and there (if we DID put Turkey in
"Europe", and courier A put it in the more expensive "Middle East"), well,
it's only one country... we can average it out a bit.

There's going to be the odd thing that really throws us, like Greenland
being in North America -- I'll bet that no courier alive will charge us 
even remotely similar prices for identical parcels to Nuuk and Los 
Angeles -- but (A) we can always break Greenland out into our own 
sub-zone, and (B) it's pretty unlikely we'll have to send anything 
to Greenland anyway.

Thanks for your help all, hope my lists come in handy for someone.

Cheers,

Paul




More information about the thelist mailing list