Get a country's continent in C#

Question

Is there a way to find a country's continent in C#, using the RegionInfo class or any other way?

For example, you give the country name "Denmark" and it returns "Europe".

Hans Passant · Answer 1 · 2011-03-27T16:21:38.113

8

Nothing like that in the .NET framework. It is also rather ambiguous with geographical definitions for Eurasia and Oceania. There are 6 distinct definitions in use. You'll need your own dbase.

edited Mar 27 '11 at 16:21

answered Mar 27 '11 at 16:00

Hans Passant

922,412
146
1,693
2,536

Iulius Curt · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-09T10:06:31.610

5

You can store a hash table. The entries will have as key the country name and as value the continent name. Just generate this table from some public database and once you have it you can simply query it. It's also pretty fast.

http://www.geonames.org/countries/
You can get from there a database

edited Aug 09 '21 at 10:06

answered Mar 27 '11 at 15:57

Iulius Curt

4,984
4
31
55

I agree with the part of the hash table but from which public database do I populate it? Do you know of any web service I can use or something? – Mark Sillatson Mar 27 '11 at 15:59
It's not that big not to do it manually, I guess. Using something like this, maybe: http://www.geonames.org/countries/ – Iulius Curt Mar 27 '11 at 16:11
6

2002 called and wants its untyped collections back. – Ben Voigt Mar 27 '11 at 16:19

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 27 '11 at 16:01

3

There are only a few continents and only a couple of hundred countries, so it wouldn't be very hard just to build your own table. There are differences of opinion as to just what the continents are (Australia/Oceania/Australasia/Asia being a particularly prickly one at times), and whether e.g. Turkey and Russia are in Europe, Asia, or both. Still, rolling your own at least lets you make your own call on these matters.

answered Mar 27 '11 at 16:01

Jon Hanna

110,372
10
146
251

3

+1 And to further complicate matters, there are divergent opinions on what *countries* qualify as countries. Man, geopolitics is hard! – Cody Gray - on strike Mar 27 '11 at 16:33
@Cody, we can often just go by the ISO list of codes for names, and leave just what those names refer to for others to argue about. Still I've a few times had to build systems that reconcile other systems' different schemes and there is no perfect solution, but then these are disagreements that have often resulted in wars and guerilla conflict, so no one programmer can expect to solve them all. – Jon Hanna Mar 27 '11 at 22:40
I certainly wasn't suggesting that any programmer could solve all the problems! The suggestion to use the ISO list is a good one, though. – Cody Gray - on strike Mar 28 '11 at 04:13
It can be worth pointing out the clients that they can't though :) – Jon Hanna Mar 28 '11 at 07:58

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 19 '12 at 18:09

1

You can use http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continent+THECOUNTRY
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continent+sweden

edited Jan 19 '12 at 18:09

sjngm

12,423
14
84
114

answered Mar 27 '11 at 16:22

Fredrik Karlsson

113
1
1
9

What's this got to do with C# or .NET? – Cody Gray - on strike Mar 27 '11 at 16:34
1

I don't know if WA would be happy about an application using their website as a web service for a problem that can be solved after a couple hours of work. – Mar 27 '11 at 16:35

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 31 '19 at 23:22

I know it's an old question but i have create a library for C# and this contains the contintent information. You can found my project here Nager.Country I hope it helps you.

A nuget package is also available install-package Nager.Country

Example

ICountryProvider countryProvider = new CountryProvider();
var countryInfo = countryProvider.GetCountry(Alpha2Code.DK);

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 27 '11 at 16:15

0

RegionInfo doesn't store continent. But you can build a database using GeoNames.org Country Information. The data format is tab-delimited text in utf8 encoding. It's has all the information and more that you need.

answered Mar 27 '11 at 16:15

Black Frog

11,595
1
35
66

Fabian · Answer 7 · 2020-12-28T17:38:36.857

The only solution is building your own lookup lists according to the continent model you need. For example, in the US and the UK we consider America as two separate continents (North America and South America), whereas people in most other countries are taught that America is a single continent.

You should also consider that some countries lay in two continents. A part of Russia is in Europe, the rest is in Asia. Same with Turkey.

Get a country's continent in C#

7 Answers7