Country Code ISO 3166 Alpha-2 Validator

Validate whether a normalized two-letter value is a currently assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. Reserved and user-assigned letter pairs are not accepted.

Description

Validate normalized values against the 249 assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes rather than letter-count formatting alone.

Validate whether a normalized two-letter value is a currently assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. Reserved and user-assigned letter pairs are not accepted.

When to use Country Code ISO 3166 Alpha-2 Validator

  • Validate normalized values against the 249 assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes rather than letter-count formatting alone.
  • Apply the same explicit rule consistently during ingest, quality control, reporting, or preservation planning.
  • Expose records that need human review without silently rewriting the source data.

How the calculation works

Reserved, exceptional, and user-assigned pairs such as EU or XK are not the same as officially assigned ISO 3166-1 country codes.1, 2

valid = uppercase(trim(code)) ∈ assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 set

Interpreting the result

Reserved, exceptional, and user-assigned pairs such as EU or XK are not the same as officially assigned ISO 3166-1 country codes.

Limitations and assumptions

  • ISO assignments can change; applications needing live maintenance notices should refresh their code table from the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency.
  • Preserve the original value and record the rule version when using this result in an archival workflow.

References

  1. ISO 3166 Country Codes — International Organization for Standardization

  2. Digital preservation — Wikipedia contributors

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