How to Get and Display Country Name as 2 Letters Rather than Full Country Name

ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 Codes

So, where do these 2-letter country codes come from? The answer lies in the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 standard, which defines a set of codes for each country. These codes consist of two letters and are unique to each country.

Getting 2-Letter Country Codes

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s explore how to get 2-letter country codes in different programming languages.

JavaScript

In JavaScript, we can use an object to store the country names and their corresponding ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 codes. Here’s an example:

const countries = {
  'United States': 'US',
  'Canada': 'CA',
  'United Kingdom': 'GB',
  'Australia': 'AU',
  'Germany': 'DE',
  // Add more countries as needed
};

With this object, we can easily retrieve the 2-letter country code by accessing the corresponding property:

const countryCode = countries['United States']; // Returns 'US'

PHP

In PHP, we can use an associative array to store the country names and their corresponding ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 codes. Here’s an example:

$countries = array(
  'United States' => 'US',
  'Canada' => 'CA',
  'United Kingdom' => 'GB',
  'Australia' => 'AU',
  'Germany' => 'DE',
  // Add more countries as needed
);

With this array, we can easily retrieve the 2-letter country code by accessing the corresponding key:

$countryCode = $countries['United States']; // Returns 'US'

Python

In Python, we can use a dictionary to store the country names and their corresponding ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 codes. Here’s an example:

countries = {
  'United States': 'US',
  'Canada': 'CA',
  'United Kingdom': 'GB',
  'Australia': 'AU',
  'Germany': 'DE',
  # Add more countries as needed
}

With this dictionary, we can easily retrieve the 2-letter country code by accessing the corresponding key:

country_code = countries['United States']  # Returns 'US'

Displaying 2-Letter Country Codes

Now that we have our 2-letter country codes, let’s explore how to display them in a user-friendly manner.

HTML Select Element

<select>
  <option value="US">United States</option>
  <option value="CA">Canada</option>
  <option value="GB">United Kingdom</option>
  <option value="AU">Australia</option>
  <option value="DE">Germany</option>
  <!-- Add more countries as needed -->
</select>

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>{{ country_name }}</td>
    <td>{{ country_code }}</td>
  </tr>
</table>