Directory Data — Multilingual Countries, Regions & Address Formats

A data package for international e-commerce: country/region names in 100+ locales plus per-country address format metadata (postcode regex, required fields, format templates) — all distributed as plain JSON, framework-agnostic.

What This Provides

countries.json

249 ISO 3166-1 countries with multilingual names:

{
  "IT": {
    "en": "Italy",
    "it_IT": "Italia",
    "fr_FR": "Italie",
    "de_DE": "Italien"
  }
}

regions/{CC}.json

Shipping-relevant administrative subdivisions per country, multilingual:

{
  "TO": { "en": "Turin",  "it_IT": "Torino" },
  "MI": { "en": "Milan",  "it_IT": "Milano" }
}

formats/{CC}.json

Per-country address format metadata sourced from Google's libaddressinput:

{
  "country": {
    "key": "IT",
    "fmt": "%N%n%O%n%A%n%Z %C %S",
    "require": "ACSZ",
    "upper": "CS",
    "zip": "\\d{5}",
    "zipex": "00144,47037,39049",
    "posturl": "http://www.poste.it/online/cercacap/"
  },
  "subdivisions": {
    "AG": { "key": "AG", "name": "Agrigento", "zip": "92" }
  }
}

Field semantics follow the libaddressinput conventions: fmt uses %N (name), %O (organization), %A (street), %Z (postcode), %C (city), %S (subdivision), %n (newline); require lists required field codes; upper lists fields that should be uppercased.

Installation

composer require mahocommerce/directory-data

Reading the Data

Use Maho\DirectoryData\Paths to resolve file locations — never hardcode vendor/mahocommerce/directory-data/... since consumers may customize Composer's vendor-dir.

use Maho\DirectoryData\Paths;

$countries = json_decode(file_get_contents(Paths::countriesFile()), true);
$itRegions = json_decode(file_get_contents(Paths::regionsFile('IT')), true);
$itFormat  = json_decode(file_get_contents(Paths::formatsFile('IT')), true);

Translation Lookup (countries.json + regions/*.json)

To keep file sizes minimal, redundant translations are omitted. Apply this fallback chain when reading:

1. Exact locale (e.g. it_IT)
2. Language code (e.g. it)
3. en (always present)

$name = $countries['IT']['it_IT']
    ?? $countries['IT']['it']
    ?? $countries['IT']['en'];

Versioning

Releases use the scheme 1.0.YYYYMMDD:

• Patch (YYYYMMDD) — daily snapshot date. New patch released only when upstream data actually changed.
• Minor (1.X.0) — additive schema changes (new fields).
• Major (X.0.0) — breaking schema changes (renames, removals, layout reorganization).

Pin with ^1.0 to receive non-breaking updates automatically.

Automated Updates

A weekly GitHub Action regenerates the data from upstream sources and, if anything changed and validation passes, commits to main and tags a new release. Packagist picks up new tags via webhook.

Data Attribution & Licensing

Repository code is MIT. Data files carry their upstream licenses — see LICENSE for the full attribution table. Summary:

Files	Source	License
countries.json, regions/*.json	Debian iso-codes via sokil/php-isocodes	LGPL-2.1+ / MIT
formats/*.json	Google libaddressinput (via chromium-i18n.appspot.com)	CC-BY 4.0

Redistributors of the formats/*.json files must preserve attribution to Google's libaddressinput per CC-BY 4.0.