Laravel Countries and Currencies Package

Antonio Carlos Ribeiro recently launched a new package that gives you a powerful setup for dealing with the different Countries of the world, all through a comfortable Laravel syntax using Collections.

The package does a lot. Everything from geology and topology, to states, currencies, and time zones.

As I was reviewing it I tried to think of some common use cases that almost every app needs and here are a few examples:

Generate a list of Countries

Need a list of all the countries in the world? It’s as simple as calling:

Countries::all()->pluck('name.common');

[
    "Aruba",
    "Afghanistan",
    "Angola",
    "Anguilla",
    "Åland Islands",
    ....

Generate a list of States

In a lot of registration forms, you need to allow people to pick their state.

Countries::where('name.common', 'United States')
    ->first()
    ->states
    ->sortBy('name')
    ->pluck('name', 'postal')

This gives you a result of the states that can then be used in a select list:

{
    "AL": "Alabama",
    "AK": "Alaska",
    "AZ": "Arizona",
    "AR": "Arkansas",
    "CA": "California",
    ....

Get the timezone for a State

Another typical pattern is figuring out a timezone. If you already have the users country and state it’s now super easy:

return Countries::where('name.common', 'United States')->first()->timezone->NC;

Returns:

America/New_York

Get a countries currency

Need to get information on a specific countries currency? With this package it’s very easy:

Countries::where('name.common', 'United States')->first()->currency;

Which returns:

[{
    "alternativeSigns": [],
    "ISO4217Code": "USD",
    "ISO4217Number": "840",
    "sign": "$",
    "subunits": 100,
    "title": "U.S. dollar",
    ....

These examples are just the basics of what can be done. It supports the following countries, states, and currencies:

• Countries
  • name (common and native)
  • currency
  • languages
  • states
  • timezone
  • flags (sprites, flag icons, svg)
  • tld
  • multiple ISO codes
  • calling code
  • capital
  • alternate spellings
  • region & sub region
  • translations (country name translated to some other languages)
  • latitude and logitude
  • borders (countries) – you can hydrate those borders (like relatioships)
  • area
  • topology
  • geometry
• Currencies
  • sign
  • ISO codes
  • title
  • subunits
  • usage (dates)
• States
  • adm codes
  • name & alt name
  • type (state, city, province, canton, department, district, etc.)
  • latitude & longitude
  • language
  • (and many more)

For more information on this package check out the GitHub repo.