Rails – Country Select

Provides a simple helper to get an HTML select list of countries using the ISO 3166-1 standard.

It is also configurable to use countries' ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as values and ISO 3166-1 names as display strings.

While the ISO 3166 standard is a relatively neutral source of country names, it may still offend some users. Developers are strongly advised to evaluate the suitability of this list given their user base.

Installation

Install as a gem using

gem install country_select

Or put the following in your Gemfile

gem 'country_select'

Usage

Simple use supplying model and attribute as parameters:

country_select("user", "country")

Supplying priority countries to be placed at the top of the list:

country_select("user", "country", [ "Great Britain", "France", "Germany" ])

Using Country Name Localization

Country names are automatically localized based on the value of I18n.locale thanks to the wonderful countries gem.

Current translations include: en, it, de, fr, es, ja, nl, but may not be complete. In the event a translation is not available, it will revert to the globally assigned locale (by default, "en").

The locale can be overridden locally:

country_select(:country_name, ['us'], {:iso_codes => true, :locale => 'es'}) 

Using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as values

You can have the option tags use ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as values and the country names as display strings. For example, the United States would appear as <option value="us">United States</option>

If you're starting a new project, this is the recommended way to store your country data since it will be more resistant to country names changing.

Beware that version 1.x converts all codes to lowercase ('us' instead of 'US'). Version 2.x will as per ISO 3166 use uppercase for all codes.

country_select("user", "country_code", nil, iso_codes: true)

country_select("user", "country_code", [ "gb", "fr", "de" ], iso_codes: true)

Global configuration to always use ISO codes

Add the following configuration to an initializer.

::CountrySelect.use_iso_codes = true

Getting the Country from ISO codes

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  # Assuming country_select is used with User attribute `country_code`
  # This will attempt to translate the country name and use the default
  # (usually English) name if no translation is available
  def country_name
    country = Country[country_code]
    country.translations[I18n.locale.to_s] || country.name
  end

end

Example Application

An example Rails application demonstrating the different options is available at scudco/country_select_test. The relevant view file lives here.

Tests

bundle
bundle exec rspec

Running with multiple versions of actionpack

bundle exec appraisal

Copyright (c) 2008 Michael Koziarski, released under the MIT license