[thelist] official list of countries (that people live in)
kasimir-k
evolt at kasimir-k.fi
Fri May 19 03:40:00 CDT 2006
Sarah Adams scribeva in 18/05/2006 20:19:
> I'm looking for an "official" list of countries to use in a web app. I
> found this list:
> http://schmidt.devlib.org/data/countries.html
This list doesn't seem very official to me, as it includes Soviet Union
(nobody lives there anymore ;-)
> I'm just not sure if it's exactly what I'm looking for. I recall reading
> somewhere once that some of these lists include countries that no one
> actually lives in (besides penguins).
A country being inhabited only by penguins doesn't make it any less of a
country... And you wouldn't want to exclude the business of your
Antarctican customers (okey, penguins might not be your most profitable
clientele, but e.g. persons on a research station might well want to buy
stuff from your web shop).
> Can someone confirm that the list
> I found does not include any such countries? If it does, is there a
> better list that someone can suggest?
Personally, I hate making political statements by defining what is a
country and what is not (Palestine, West Sahara, East Timor, ...) so I
let others do the decission for me. I use the ISO 3166-1 [0] but others
might prefer the UN's list [1] which has pretty much the same countries.
.k
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 or
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/index.html
[1] http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49.htm
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