Lookup mechanism for renamed countries e.g. Swaziland

[sandy-fairsupply]

Countries change names from time to time. For example, Swaziland changed its name to Eswatini in 2018, but kept their country code (SWZ). "Swaziland" doesn't appear in countries or former_countries, so it's not possible to look up the country code based on old data without a separate look-up table.

It would be nice to have a mechanism for looking up countries by their former names.

[Atem18]

Hi,

thanks for the bug report, I will check how to do that.

[Atem18]

@sandy-fairsupply Since "Swaziland" does not appear in countries or former_countries but still is translations, this looks like a bug. Can you file one in the upstream repo : https://salsa.debian.org/iso-codes-team/iso-codes ?

[sandy-fairsupply]

I would, but I don't have a Salsa account which is a bit of a barrier for me. Also, I think I lack the experience in this domain to make a good report. Would you mind doing it?

Relevant documents:

• ISO/TC 46 - Update released on 2018-07-16

  N971 - Swaziland - Change of the full name and short name.xlsx

Curiously, it doesn't seem to be in ISO 3166-3 (although I don't have access to the official document). Maybe that's because it was just renamed, not dissolved.

I suspect the only way to deal with this kind of issue would be to consume the updates (like the one I linked to above), rather than exclusively importing the codes in bulk.

[Atem18]

This library is intended to allow easy access to the debian upstream files so if there is any issue, it should be reported there.

I will make a bug report and see what they are saying.

[Atem18]

@sandy-fairsupply Bur report created : https://salsa.debian.org/iso-codes-team/iso-codes/-/issues/46

Let's see what they will say.

[Atem18]

Hi @sandy-fairsupply, since upstream does not reply, I tried to make a fix inside the lib. Can you test the latest version isocodes-2025.8.13 if this match your expectations ? Thanks a lot in advance.