How not to sort a list of countries
Being from the United Kingdom is hard sometimes. When scrolling through a list of countries, we might be found down the bottom as "UK" or near the top as "Great Britain". Occasionally someone files us under "England" - thus ignoring Wales, Scotland, NI etc. Once in a while, it'll be "The UK". Truly, no one has suffered as we have suffered⸮
Here's a list of countries from the Curve Credit card (join and we both get a fiver!) - I scrolled all the way to the bottom looking for the UK, only to find it nestled between France and Greece!
The more you look at the list, the weirder it becomes. Why is Spain next to Estonia? Ah! Because they are Espania! Croatia next to Hungary? A sensible location for the Republika Hrvatska!
I assume they've been sorted by each country's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code:
- EE
- ES
- FI
- FR
- GB (Because UK might be confused with Ukraine, I guess?)
- GR
- HR
- HU
- IE
I know there are loads of falsehoods that programmers believe about names, flags, languages, countries, and addresses. So I guess we need to add a "falsehoods programmers believe about sorting lists of countries"!
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"UK" is actually just exceptionally reserved upon the request of the UK but isn't technically assigned to the United Kingdom
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