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ExRegion

The smart and fast way to work with ISO 3166 countries and subdivisions, on *nix systems in Elixir.

This library depends upon the widely available pkg-isocodes linux package. Most linux distros depend upon the famous Debian iso-codes repo for this.

Your distro might call this package something else, so here's a handy list of links.

Arch Ubuntu Fedora

And, please help me add links for other distros, I'm a lazy human!

Inspiration

I'm not a genius, I found this is how pycountry does it. Then, ctrl+c ctrl+v

FAQ

Why another lib? How's this any better from others?

Here's a list of alternative libraries:

  • countriex
    • Only country data 👎
    • Very low maintenance as it simply pulls data from the ruby countries gem.
    • Still, the regeneration task has to be run manually.
  • Countries
    • Has both country and subdivision data 👍
    • Very high maintenance as it brings all the data along as YAML. 👎
    • YAML parsing is soooooo slow 😠 (too many files, parse done serially... it's YAML what do you expect?)
  • Worldly
    • Very high maintenance as it brings all the data along as YAML. 👎
    • YAML parsing is soooooo slow 😠 (they even accept it on their README).

I have two unbeatable arguments for ExRegion,

  1. Speed

    • Parse just two JSON files (< 500KB) using [jason][jason].

  2. Free maintenance Yes, I have my cake and eat it too. Thanks to the awesome team that maintains the upstream debian repo, and people at ISO.

    If you ever notice that the standards got updated, simply upgrade your iso-codes package!

How do I check if my system has this iso-codes package?

Easy, just see if there's something at /usr/share/iso-codes/json/.

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding exregion to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:exregion, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

TODO

The goal is primarily speed and leveraging commonly available linux packages.

  • So the [debian repo] exposes many ISO standards, and even translations in almost every locale. Wouldn't it be nice if we can get all that?
  • Some cool functions to group or filter things?
  • Time zone info
  • Tests.
  • Integrate with CLDR? There are already some repos in the Elixir world like money -- don't wanna compete with them.
  • Geo and topological information?
  • Demographics?