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Locale-Object-0.82
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/ database.pod

NAME

database.pod - documentation for the Locale::Object database

THE DATABASE

The database of locale information used by the Locale::Object modules uses DBD::SQLite, and contains several tables.

the "country" table

CREATE TABLE country (
    code_alpha2           char(2),
    code_alpha3           char(3),
    code_numeric          smallint,
    name                  char(100),
    dialing_code          smallint,
    utc_offset_main       char(5),
    utc_offsets_all       char(50),
    PRIMARY KEY           (code_alpha2)
);

  • code_alpha2 , code_alpha3, code_numeric and name are data from ISO 3166 - see http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso3166.txt.

  • dialing_code is an International Direct Dialing code - see http://kropla.com/dialcode.htm.

  • utc_offset_main is the time offset of the time zone of the country's capital from UTC, expressed decimally in hours. utc_offsets_all is a comma-separated list of offsets for all time zones that the country falls across, listed from west to east. If there is only one value this will match utc_offset_main.

the "currency" table

CREATE TABLE currency (
    country_code   char(2),
    name           char(100),
    code           char(3),
    code_numeric   smallint,
    symbol         char(20),
    subunit        char(100),
    subunit_amount smallint,
    PRIMARY KEY  (country_code)
);

the "continent" table

CREATE TABLE continent (
    country_code char(2),
    name         char(13),
    PRIMARY KEY  (country_code)
);
*country_code contains ISO 3166 two-letter codes again, and name contains associated continent names (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America). Sourced from http://www.worldatlas.com/cntycont.htm.

the "language" table

CREATE TABLE language (
    code_alpha2  char(2),
    code_alpha3  char(3),
    name         char(100),
    PRIMARY KEY  (code_alpha2)
);

  • code_alpha2 contains 2-letter ISO 639-1 language codes. See http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php.

  • code_alpha3 contains 3-letter ISO 639-2. There two parts of ISO 639-2, B (for 'bibliographic') and T (for 'terminology'), which differ in 23 instances out of the full list of 464 codes. For simplicity, this module uses the ISO 639-2/T versions. For more information, see the URL above and also http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/develop.html.

  • name contains the standard names of languages in English as defined by ISO 639.

the "language_mappings" table

CREATE TABLE language_mappings (
    id           char(4),
    country      char(2),
    language     char(3),
    official     boolean,
    PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

An example section of this table:

ID   COUNTRY  LANGUAGE  OFFICIAL
at_0   at       deu      true
at_1   at       slv      false
at_2   at       hrv      false
at_3   at       hun      false

What this tells us is that in Austria, four languages are spoken: German, Slovenian, Croatian (Hrvatska) and Hungarian, and that only German is an official language of Austria. The mappings are ranked in order of prevalence of language, official languages first, followed by non-official. Please note that this is approximate at best.

My original source for the language-country mappings was http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0855611.html. However, there is no clear origin for this list, which occurs in several places on the Web, and it required some serious rationalization before data was able to be usefully extracted for it. List updated in 2019-11 mostly from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/.

In addition to the preceding, the following sources were invaluable:

the "timezone" table

CREATE TABLE timezone (
    country_code          char(2),
    timezone              char(50),
    is_default            boolean
);

An example section of this table:

COUNTRY_CODE  TIMEZONE           IS_DEFAULT
     br       America/Recife       false     
     br       America/Fortaleza    false
     br       America/Belem        false
     br       America/Noronha      true

  • country_code contains ISO 3166 two-letter country codes.

  • timezone contains time zone names as defined in the Olson database. See http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm for more than you ever wanted to know about this.

  • is_default contains a boolean value indicating whether the time zone in question is default in the country. For countries with more than one time zone, a value of 'true' indicates the time zone covers the nation's capital.

The data for this table was sourced from http://s.keim.free.fr/tz/tznames/.