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.

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