Country data library for NET8

Today, I’m going to release a simple cross-platform offline country data library for NET8. The library is based on the ISO-3166-1 standard. Based on the operating system, using Unicode*, you can display the flag of the country. On Windows, the emoji displays the shortcode of the country, not the flag.

The library has the flags of the countries in SVG format. The flags can be displayed in two different types: Square and Wide.

The source code of the library is available on GitHub.

Install Library

To install the library in your project, open the Package Manager and type the following command:

Install-Package PSC.CSharp.CountryData

Also, you can use the .NET CLI to install the library. Type the following command:

dotnet add package PSC.CSharp.CountryData

Usage

Here is an example how to use the library in your project.

Initialize the CountryData

// loads all Country Data via the constructor (You can initialize this once as a singleton)
var countryHelper = new CountryHelper();

Get the list of countries

foreach (var country in countries) 
    Console.WriteLine(country);

Get the list of regions in a country by country code

var regions = countryHelper.GetRegionByCountryCode("IT");
foreach (var region in regions)
    Console.WriteLine(region.Name);

Using lambda for custom queries

GetCountryData() returns an IEnumerable<Country> which can be queried with Lambda for a more flexible usage.

var data = countryHelper.GetCountryData();

Get the list of countries by their Names

This code displays the name of the countries using a foreach.

var countries = data.Select(c => c.CountryName).ToList();
foreach (var country in countries)
    Console.WriteLine(country);

Here the code to use Linq to filter the list.

data.Where(x => x.CountryShortCode == "US")
    .Select(r=>r.Regions).FirstOrDefault()
    .ToList();

Get the flag for a country

In the library, I added a method to get the flag of a country. The flags are in SVG format. The type of the flag can be Square or Wide.

var flag = helper.GetFlagByCountryCode("GB", FlagType.Square);

List of supported ISO-3166-1 country codes

Here is the list of supported ISO-3166-1 country codes, their code point pairs and Emoji flags. Based on the operating system, you see different Emoji.
In Windows, you see the short name of the country. In iOS and Android, the flag of the correspondent country is displayed.

Functions

Flags

Get a full SVG

The GetFlagByCountryCode returns only the content of the SVG file. What it doesn’t have is the XML declaration and the DOCTYPE declaration.
If you want to get the full SVG file, you can use the GetFullSVG function in the SVGFlags static class.

var svgFlag = SVGFlags.GetFullSVG(SVGFlags.lgbt_1, "300", "300");