Free XML File resource containing countries?

[mr_burns]

Hi there,

I there anywhere on the internet where I can obtain free XML files?
What I am looking for is an XML file containing all the countries of
the world. I could creat one myself but if there are files available
it would save me some time. For example:

<xml>
<countries>
<country id="1">Afghanistan</country>
<country id="2">Albania</country>

 

[Martin Honnen]

mr_burns wrote:

I there anywhere on the internet where I can obtain free XML files?
What I am looking for is an XML file containing all the countries of
the world. I could creat one myself but if there are files available
it would save me some time. For example:

<xml>
<countries>
<country id="1">Afghanistan</country>
<country id="2">Albania</country>
.
.
.
<country id="150">Zimbabwe</country>
</countries>

There are lists like this here:
http://www.nw.com/zone/iso-country-codes
it should not be too difficult to read and parse that and make it into XML.

 

[Andy Dingley]

I there anywhere on the internet where I can obtain free XML files?

Find a free text file (of which there are rather more) and convert the
format. You might find it in XML, but the conversion is easy enough.

I suggest searching for "ISO 3166" for lists of recognised country
codes, or "ISO 639" for languages

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

What I am looking for is an XML file containing all the countries of
the world.

Do you mean names of the countries? In which language, and according to
which authority? There are disputes on what is a country, and also on
country names.

There is an official (ISO) standard on country _codes_, and the naming
authority's pages are at
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/index.html
(I haven't checked whether they have the data in XML format.)

But names are a different issue; the names in ISO 3166 are just for
identifying the countries, not to be taken as official names.

However there are good The Unicode Consortium has Common Locale Data
Repository, which is intended to contain reliable information about a large
amount of localized data, such as country names, language names, time zone
names, etc., in a large number of languages, in an XML format, specifically
in LDML language.

I would say that CLDR, though with lots of unconfirmed data, is already the
best available general resource on such matters. It's Web site is
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/
and e.g. most of the current locale data for "en" (English, generically),
containing country names in the <territories> element, is at
http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/locale/common/main/en.xml

 

[Manuel Collado]

...
There is an official (ISO) standard on country _codes_, and the naming
authority's pages are at
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/index.html
(I haven't checked whether they have the data in XML format.)

They do have it:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/iso_3166-1_xml_en.zip