Convert country codes

Question

There are several methods on country codes.

I have a list of codes with 3-characters, like on this page:

http://www.fina.org/H2O/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=93:asia&Itemid=638&layout=default

Is there a simple way to convert them to 2-characters? Like "PT" from "POR" for Portugal.

Standard for 2-characters - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are some useful data files that you can get from http://country.io/data that'll help you:

• http://country.io/iso3.json - a map of ISO2 to ISO3 country codes
• http://country.io/names.json - a map of ISO2 country codes to country names

If you just want to go from 3 letter codes to 2 letter codes you can just flip the first map and use that. You could create a map that goes directly from 3 letter codes to country names by combing the files though. Here's a simple PHP example:

$codes = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://country.io/iso3.json'), true);
$names = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://country.io/names.json'), true);
$iso3_to_name = array();
foreach($codes as $iso2 => $iso3) {
    $iso3_to_name[$iso3] = $names[$iso2];
}

echo $names("PL"); // => "Poland"
echo $iso3_to_map("POL"); // => "Poland"

Answer 2

I see that the question was asked seven years ago. Today I had the similar issue and found one good solution. Hope that this answer will be helpful to others who will have the same issue in the future.

There is a separate library which can be used https://github.com/thephpleague/iso3166

Then the solution would be straightforward. $alpha3 is the three char representation of a country. And alpha2 is two char representation of the country.

1. $ composer require league/iso3166
2. $data = (new League\ISO3166\ISO3166)->alpha3($alpha3);

3. Data looks as follows:

   [
     'name' => 'Netherlands',
     'alpha2' => 'NL',
     'alpha3' => 'NLD',
     'numeric' => '528',
     'currency' => [
       'EUR',
       ]
   ]
   

4. $countryCodeInTwoChar = $data['alpha2']