ruby-continent

ruby-continent provides a mechanism to get the continent for a given country, or to get the countries given a continent. Effort has been made to make the library very light weight and efficient.

Countries are returned as a hash in the following format:

{
  :name => 'Turkey, Republic of',
  :continent_codes => ['EU', 'AS'],
  :alpha_2_code => 'TR',
  :alpha_3_code => 'TUR',
  :numeric_code => 792
}

The Turkey example demonstrates how continent codes are given as an array, as some countries can belong to multiple continents. Countries which only belong to one continent are also given as an array.

There are a few methods to select a country, based on ISO 3166-1 codes. These all return a single country in the format above, or nil if not found.

Continent.by_alpha_2_code('AU')
Continent.by_alpha_3_code('AUS')
Continent.by_numeric_code(36)

The following function takes a continent code and returns an array of countries in the format above, or nil if the continent is invalid.

Continent.by_continent_code('OC')

Continent codes and names are defined in share/continent_names.yml.

There is a helper method to get the continent name from the code, as codes are used inside the country hashes.

Continent.continent_name('OC')

Full access to the underlying data is available via Continent.data, which is lazily loaded.

Please see COPYING provided with these source files.