I recently had a project at work which required a web-based user registration sort of feature. Because the project had an international flavor, I had to let people from every country register. And since we were going to need to generate reports broken down by country and eventually make mailing labels from the data stored in our MySQL database, I wanted the data to be pretty clean. Thus, I didn't want people to either have to or be able to type in their country of origin by hand. I wanted a select list they could choose from.

What I wound up doing was making a table which listed the names and ISO 3166 codes of all the countries of the world. I then referenced this table in my main user registration table as a foreign key. This allowed us to look at all the people that had registered from Europe, let's say, and then make graphs with the two-letter ISO codes on them for clarity. It worked out pretty well.

To make a long story short, I realized that this was not only the fourth time I had made such a table, but also the fourth time I had done it from scratch (and it was the third time I had done it by writing a perl script which screen-scraped a list off the web). This is silly and a waste of time. So I decided to put my SQL file up where I can get it later if I needed it. Since sharing is good, I made it public here so other people can get it if they find it useful (I didn't find much when I went googling for such a list...).

So if you happen to find yourself needing a MySQL table with the ISO 3166 codes and names for every country in the world, you're in luck</>. I also included some other example tables and a PHP code snippet which makes HTML form select lists automatically from the table.