Countries in Django

17 November 2009

Django is my preferred web framework. If you don't know what I am talking about, then you can read my previous posts, e.g. here and here and so on.

Anyway, for the people who do like Django, it comes with a nice set of local field types for inputting post codes and zip codes in different countries as well as Peruvian national identity numbers, Australian territories, Romanian Bank Account Numbers, Icelandic phone numbers and lots of other stuff. This saves you the hassle of implementing fields for these types of data yourself.

Somewhat bizarrely however, Django does not currently contain a field for what country the person or thing is in, which is often a very basic yet important piece of data to collect.

Fortunately, people have started work on this and on a LanguageField, however the patches have been languishing on the bug tracker for some time.

I wanted the CountryField now, so I copied and pasted from the patches and put it in a module, this is on my code page (direct link is here).

It is pretty obvious how you use it, import the field into your models file:

from whatever.countries import CountryField

Then you can add it to a model:

class Whatever(models.Model):
    country_based_in = CountryField(blank = True)

Here the field is shown in the automatically generated admin:

It seems to have all of the countries that one is ever likely to encounter on the web. The module lists countries alphabetically, however lots of online forms put the United States and perhaps the United Kingdom and other large Internet using countries at the top. If you want to do this, then just arrange the tuple in the order that you want, and delete everything from line 276 onwards (i.e. def sorted_countries etc)

This module is beautifully simple, yet it probably saved me 30 to 60 minutes of fiddling about. This is the joy of programming in a friendly open source community, someone has already done the hard work for you already, you just need to dig it out of some bug tracker and adapt it to your needs.

Happy hacking and all that jazz.

1 Christian Joergensen says...

Wouldn't the ordering get messed up after i18n?

Posted at 9:43 a.m. on November 17, 2009

2 djm says...

Am I being a moose or did you mean:

from whatever.countries import CountryField

instead of

from whatever.countries import CharField

Good post though, cheers.

Posted at 12:42 p.m. on November 17, 2009

3 Phillip Temple says...

Good start, but: a) wouldn't I want None back rather than 'ZZ'? b) why not add a 'shortcut' boolean, then prepend flagged fields (plus usual '-----' separator) to the actual list c) it would be great to provide a .po file with all the countries translated, so visitors can see country names in their natural language d) wouldn't it be more Django-esque to make sorted_countries a Manager method on the Model?

Phillip.

Posted at 5:24 p.m. on November 17, 2009

4 Zeth says...

Thanks djm, I am the moose here.

Christian, assuming one actually does Internationalise the countries, it should still work I guess, as the gettext stuff will happen before the list is sorted.

Unless of course you did the US first thing, then yes it would.

Posted at 7:50 p.m. on November 17, 2009

5 Cupcake says...

Good post! You helped me a lot with my school project!

CountryField(blank = True) < (K)

Posted at 12:11 a.m. on July 31, 2010

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Good post! You helped me a lot with my school project! CountryField(blank = True) < (K)
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