[ic] Scotland missing from countries/states

[Lyn St George]

On Friday 15 January 2010 16:23:09 Paul Jordan wrote:
> Thanks Lyn and Gert.
>
> Lyn your solution interesting enough for a go around. Your solution leaves
> you with UK and GB covering everything - and that should work out. I know
> some shipping software is picky about country names - this client uses
> Endicia. From what I remember of it, this should work fine.
>
> Shortly after I posted I noticed that Scotland does not have it's own ISO
> country code - it uses GB, which since the "code" field that stores this in
> IC is the primary key, I could not just add (properly).
>
> Thanks!
> Paul

ISO naming gets a bit murky here - they don't recognise UK either, which has 
unfortunate consequences for Northern Ireland as this only exists as part of 
the UK, not of Great Britain or Ireland (passports here are issued in the 
name of "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", though 
nowadays this is on behalf of the European Union). ISO 3166 lists GB for 
United Kingdom, and that would be an obvious thing to do in the state.txt 
file except that, even though I'm an expat from New Zealand living in the UK 
and don't have that innate patriotism that those born here have, I'm still 
reluctant to obliterate the UK. International sport, eg the Rugby Union or 
the Olympics Committee, recognise Scotland etc as separate countries or 
nations which may compete under their own flags. 

Payment systems as well as shipping systems have the same problem, and it's 
best to remap UK to GB internally on those (eg, both Paypal and 
Googlecheckout will lookup addresses keyed on the country code and barf on 
UK), and send Scotland etc as GB.

At the end of the day, displaying what the customer expects while sending what 
the back-end systems expect is probably best. 

Lyn