Most projects I work on need a list of countries at some point so I put together a snippet of SQL that I could reuse to create and populate a countries table in the database with all countries as given in ISO 3166-1. After recently writing a utility class to populate list controls with world currencies according to ISO 4217 it got me wondering if I could also do the same for countries using only the .Net Framework. And so I came up with the following utility class to do the job.
/// <summary>
/// Populates the list control with countries as given by ISO 4217.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="ctrl">The list control to populate.</param>
public static void FillWithISOCountries(ListControl ctrl)
{foreach (CultureInfo cultureInfo in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
{ RegionInfo regionInfo = new RegionInfo(cultureInfo.LCID);
if (ctrl.Items.FindByValue(regionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName) == null)
{ctrl.Items.Add(new ListItem(regionInfo.EnglishName, regionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName));
}
}
RegionInfo currentRegionInfo = new RegionInfo(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.LCID);
//- Default the selection to the current cultures country
if (ctrl.Items.FindByValue(currentRegionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName) != null)
{ctrl.Items.FindByValue(currentRegionInfo.TwoLetterISORegionName).Selected = true;
}
}