How to convert a country string to its ISO 3166-1 code using Zend?

Question

Does anybody know if it's possible to use Zend_Locale to get the ISO 3166-1 code for a country if you have the country name as a string? For example I have "Nederland" so I would like to get "NL".

Answer 1

I don't know if Zend has something for that, but it's fairly easy to do on your own.

This tutorial shows how you can grab the latest list of ISO 3166-1 country codes in XML format, parse it, and then create a PHP file that can be included when you need a country code translation array:

$str = file_get_contents('http://opencountrycodes.appspot.com/xml/');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($str);
$out = '$countries'." = array(\n";
foreach ($xml->country as $country)
{
    $out .= "'{$country['code']}' => \"{$country['name']}\",\n";
}
$out .= ");";

file_put_contents('country_names.php', $out);

Alternately, you can save it as a CSV file and load it using PHP's fgetcsv() function. That would probably be preferable IMO. Or, heck, you could just save the XML and parse it when you load it.