Hi,
I have the following custom field:

from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

COUNTRIES = (
    ('GB', _('United Kingdom')),
    ('AF', _('Afghanistan')),
    ('AX', _('Aland Islands')),
    ('AL', _('Albania')),
    ('DZ', _('Algeria')),
    .
    .
    .
)

class CountryField(models.CharField):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        kwargs.setdefault('max_length', 2)
        kwargs.setdefault('choices', COUNTRIES)
        super(CountryField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def get_internal_type(self):
        return "CharField"

That field ends up in an HTML <select>, and I'd like the countries to be
sorted by their label in all locales. I have tried to replace this code:

kwargs.setdefault('choices', COUNTRIES)

with this:

kwargs.setdefault('choices', sorted(COUNTRIES, key=lambda x: x[1]))

but that's sorting the list only by the original English names, whatever
the locale.

I can't switch to ugettext instead of the _lazy version, because this is a
Field so it won't work at all.

Do you have any suggestion on how to get my list of countries properly
sorted in all locales?

Thank you!
Salvatore Iovene.

Have you tried sorting them at the template level? A filter like dictsort
might do the trick
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/?from=ol...

I think this should work:

... ('GB', _('United Kingdom')),
... ('AF', _('Afghanistan')),
... ('AX', _('Aland Islands')),
... ('AL', _('Albania')),
... ('DZ', _('Algeria')),)

[('AF', 'Afghanistan'), ('AX', 'Aland Islands'), ('AL', 'Albania'),
('DZ', 'Algeria'), ('GB', 'United Kingdom')]

Sorry I just realized that even though that sorts them correctly, it
doesn't solve your problem.

Have you tried setting the choices in your form, like:

class SomeFormUsingCountryField(forms.Form):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(SomeFormUsingCountryField, self).__init__(*args,
**kwargs)
        self.fields['country_field'].choices = sorted(COUNTRIES,
key=lambda c: c[1])

Funny, that fixes it. Thanks!

It's a layer violation, so I have to do it for each form that uses my
field, but it works.

Salvatore.

Btw, the reason this doesn't work is because setdefault doesn't work
as you think it does. See [1] for an example.

For the 'layer violation', you might try:

class CountryField(models.CharField):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(CountryField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.choices = sorted(COUNTRIES, key=lambda c: c[1])
        ...

I haven't tried this but it might work.
Cheers

[1]http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2010/02/python-setdefault-example/