Croatia 2 Letter Country Code
Janita Locklin
Member States of the European Union (EU) and other countries have been assigned a two-letter country code, always written in capital letters, and often used as an abbreviation in statistical analyses, tables, figures or maps.
The protocol order in which countries are often listed is based on the alphabetical list of countries in their national language for EU and EFTA Member States and for candidate countries; for potential candidates, it is based on the alphabetical order of their country code.
EU Member States come first, followed by European Free Trade Association (EFTA) Member States, candidate countries for EU membership, potential candidates and, finally, other countries. The order in the tables below is first column down, then second column down, etc..
(*) This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence.(with asterisk and footnote in written documents, only the first time that Kosovo is mentioned).
ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are three-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. They allow a better visual association between the codes and the country names than the two-letter alpha-2 codes (the third set of codes is numeric and hence offers no visual association).[1] They were first included as part of the ISO 3166 standard in its first edition in 1974.
The ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are used most prominently in ISO/IEC 7501-1 for machine-readable passports, as standardized by the International Civil Aviation Organization, with a number of additional codes for special passports; some of these codes are currently reserved and not used at the present stage in ISO 3166-1.[2]
The United Nations uses a combination of ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes, along with codes that pre-date the creation of ISO 3166, for international vehicle registration codes, which are codes used to identify the issuing country of a vehicle registration plate; some of these codes are currently indeterminately reserved in ISO 3166-1.[3]
The following is a complete list of the current officially assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes,[4] using a title case version of the English short names officially defined by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA):
User-assigned code elements are codes at the disposal of users who need to add further names of countries, territories, or other geographical entities to their in-house application of ISO 3166-1, and the ISO 3166/MA will never use these codes in the updating process of the standard. The following alpha-3 codes can be user-assigned: AAA to AAZ, QMA to QZZ, XAA to XZZ, and ZZA to ZZZ.[5]
NATO STANAG 1059 INT is built upon ISO alpha-3 codes, but also defines alpha-2 codes incompatible with ISO 3166-1. It introduces several private use codes for fictional countries and organizational entities:
Reserved code elements are codes which have become obsolete, or are required in order to enable a particular user application of the standard but do not qualify for inclusion in ISO 3166-1. To avoid transitional application problems and to aid users who require specific additional code elements for the functioning of their coding systems, the ISO 3166/MA, when justified, reserves these codes which it undertakes not to use for other than specified purposes during a limited or indeterminate period of time. The reserved alpha-3 codes can be divided into the following four categories: exceptional reservations, transitional reservations, indeterminate reservations, and codes currently agreed not to use.
Exceptionally reserved code elements are codes reserved at the request of national ISO member bodies, governments and international organizations, which are required in order to support a particular application, as specified by the requesting body and limited to such use; any further use of such code elements is subject to approval by the ISO 3166/MA. The following alpha-3 codes are currently exceptionally reserved:
Transitional reserved code elements are codes reserved after their deletion from ISO 3166-1. These codes may be used only during a transitional period of at least five years while new code elements that may have replaced them are taken into use. These codes may be reassigned by the ISO 3166/MA after the expiration of the transitional period. The following alpha-3 codes are currently transitionally reserved:
Indeterminately reserved code elements are codes used to designate road vehicles under the 1949 and 1968 United Nations Conventions on Road Traffic but differing from those contained in ISO 3166-1. These code elements are expected eventually to be either eliminated or replaced by code elements within ISO 3166-1. In the meantime, the ISO 3166/MA has reserved such code elements for an indeterminate period. Any use beyond the application of the two Conventions is discouraged and will not be approved by the ISO 3166/MA. Moreover, these codes may be reassigned by the ISO 3166/MA at any time. The following alpha-3 codes are currently indeterminately reserved:
Besides the codes currently transitionally reserved and two other codes currently exceptionally reserved (FXX for France, Metropolitan and SUN for USSR), the following alpha-3 codes have also been deleted from ISO 3166-1:[8]
This is a complete list of all country ISO codes as described in the ISO 3166 international standard.
These codes are used throughout the IT industry by computer systems and software to ease the identification of country names.
We have compiled them in the quick reference table below in order to help our clients do quick conversions from the numeric or 2 letter code to any country name.
This entry includes the two-letter codes maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the ISO 3166 Alpha-2 list and used by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to establish country-coded top-level domains (ccTLDs).
The assignment of countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories by the United Nations.
The list of countries or areas contains the names of countries or areas in alphabetical order, their three-digit numerical codes used for statistical processing purposes by the Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat, and their three-digit alphabetical codes assigned by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).1 In general, this list of countries or areas includes those countries or areas for which statistical data are compiled by the Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat.
The names of countries or areas refer to their short form used in day-to-day operations of the United Nations and not necessarily to their official name as used in formal documents. These names are based on the United Nations Terminology Database (UNTERM).2 The designations employed and the presentation of material at this site do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
The list of geographic regions presents the composition of geographical regions used by the Statistics Division in its publications and databases. Each country or area is shown in one region only. These geographic regions are based on continental regions; which are further subdivided into sub-regions and intermediary regions drawn as to obtain greater homogeneity in sizes of population, demographic circumstances and accuracy of demographic statistics.
The ISO 3166 classification defines unique two- and three-digit-codes for all countries worldwide. This list below offers an overview of all two-digit ISO country codes (ISO-3166 Alpha-2) for all European countries.
The following country codes must precede all certificate numbers on Official Meat Inspection Certificates (OMIC) for export to Canada. For the PHIS certificates Importer/broker must add the ISO code US in front of certificate number when entering information in Single Window.
Nope, you've got the easy solution already: The array (or DB table, or a keyed structure like a hash map) solution is pretty much the standard way of doing this. I guess there may also be some web services available that can provide the list, but I think that would be overkill (its not worth relying on a third party system to be working for something this simple). Similar arrays would be used for lists of counties/provinces/states within a country if you needed that level of detail.
The only thing to beware of with that is if you're accepting the country name as user input, you'll need to watch for spelling errors, incorrect capitalisation, and using alternative names for countries (eg "Switzerland" could legitimately be referred to as "Schweiz" or "Suisse" or "The Swiss Confederation", or a number of other variants.
More commonly, user input is restricted to known country codes by providing a drop-list so that the user picks the country he wants and the program knows immediately that it is "CH". This also requires the same array to be in place, but is referenced in the other direction, and is more reliable (since there is only one possible code for each country).
You can use JCountry which is an open source library containing the ISO 3166-1 codes, and it's corresponding country name translations to different languages. It is a wrapper for the debian iso-codes info. It also contains the iso codes for languages (iso 639-2) and the corresponding language name translations.
You can do it the other way around, by looking for a country info by using the alpha2 or alpha3 code. This library also has translations to country names but de default is english (also for the map suggested before).
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