Magento - Get Country Id from Name - is there a easier/quicker way?

Question

I need to load the 2 letter ISO2 country ID for a given country name.

Right now, I use the following method to do this:

// Method to Get countryId fr         


        

Answer 1

Surprisingly, looping is the only way you'll achieve this.

The country names are stored in XML files in lib/Zend/Locale/Data/ and they're organized by locale (en, es, fr) and then country code, not country name.

Since it's not a SQL table you can't add a WHERE clause (using Magento's addFieldToFilter()), so you'll be looping through the XML nodes anyway.