[Pkg-isocodes-devel] Obsolete countries - alpha 2 codes

[Pedro Ferreira]

Hello everyone,

I am pretty new to the list, so, I apologize if this question has 
already been brought up sometime in the past.

I've seen that `iso_3166/iso_3166.xml` contains a series of 
`iso_3166_entry` records that contain former countries/territories for 
historical purposes. This is really nice as we were needing exactly this 
for our application. We don't want it to fail in case there is an old DB 
record referencing a country that is not on the official ISO list anymore.

However, there is a little problem: even though (I believe) these 
countries/territories (or at least part of them) have associated alpha 2 
codes[1], these are not included in the XML. I am not sure whether that 
is because the codes in question do not figure in the standard (I don't 
have access to the document and I don't feel like paying 74CHF in order 
to get an answer) or some other reason I may not be aware of.

So, that's what I'd like to ask: is there any special reason why the two 
letter codes for the countries in question are not included in the XML?

Thanks in advance,


Pedro


[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Deleted_codes


-- 
Pedro Ferreira

Software Developer, Indico Project
http://indico-software.org

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