ISO Country/Currency data

Question

All,

Our application requires data on ISO countries and currencies (where the data must be up to date). We did purchase country/currency data from ISO themselves, however we still needed to perform alot of manual manipulation of the data, as well as write our own tool to read and process the data into our database.

1. Are we going about getting this data the wrong way?

2. What is the norm in relation to the acquisition of country/currency data?

3. Is there any well known providers out there that are offer to provide this data as a service or through some other medium in a usable format?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The .NET CultureInfo class provides formatting for currencies (as well as dates, times, numbers, etc). I would never have even considered buying the data from ISO when it's available for free in the .NET runtime.

Answer 2

You might be interested by IBM's International Component for Unicode (ICU) library.

Open source, well known, supports "numbers, dates, times and currency amounts" formatting.

Not sure if it helps your case, but this info might be useful for somebody else... :-)