Announce: WWW::Scraper::Wikipedia::ISO3166
Hi Folks
After an email discussion with Kim Ryan, author of Locale::SubCountry, and a recent exchange on this very blog, about removing Locale::Country::SubCountry from CPAN, I've released WWW::Scraper::Wikipedia::ISO3166 V 1.01.
It's main purpose is to ship a SQLite database of countries and subcountries, and an interface to that db.
The db can be used directly, or exported as CSV or HTML.
Pre-exported files are shipped in the distro as data/*.csv and data/*.html.
The HTML looks like this.
The Wikipedia files I downloaded are also shipped in the distro under data/*.html, to encourage you to access them locally if playing with the code, rather than hitting Wikipedia itself repeatedly.
If you think this makes the distro too big (4Mb) let me know. I can easily drop the those files.
I try to write all code in Perl, but find I end up writing in bash, CSS, HTML, JS, and SQL, and doing database design, just to get anything done...
Great work! One bit of feedback. . .
The title of http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=8349 is "ISO 3166-2:1998 - Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions -- Part 2: Country subdivision code"
What's a subcountry? Should it be called a "country subdivision" instead?
philip@here&now:
Good question. We use subcountry to avoid having to write state/province/region/department/parish/and/twenty/other/words.
See the 3rd column in this page for gory details.
And using a single word instead of 2 (more words) quickly becomes the norm.
Cheers
Ron