Getting the name of a region

[Sam Stickland]

Hi,

I'm trying to use this in an application to mark Bank Holidays in a user's calendar.

In order to make this work I'm assuming I need to collect the region a user is in, and to do that I'm going to need a list of regions, converted to English names (at the very least, possibly I18n'ed names in the future).

Is there anyway to do that?

Also, there seems to be some regions I wouldn't want a user to select. For example, if gb_con (Cornwall) is selected, then this will no longer show Easter Monday in England, which is incorrect:

> Holidays.on(Date.parse('2016-03-28'), :gb_con)
=> []
> Holidays.on(Date.parse('2016-03-28'), :gb_eng)
=> [{:date=>Mon, 28 Mar 2016, :name=>"Easter Monday", :regions=>[:gb_eng, :gb_wls, :gb_eaw, :gb_nir]}]

[Phil Peble]

Hi @samstickland! Sorry for the delay, had a busy week.

Currently I don't think we can give you what you seem to need. All I can give you at the moment is a list of all of the regions we have available:

Holidays.load_all
Holidays.regions # <- returns an array of all available region symbols (i.e. :gb, :us, etc)

This isn't exactly what you want but currently we don't map an English name, let alone a i18n'ed name. That'll have to be something we add.

As to your second point, the issue is that :gb is an overall 'parent' (for lack of a better term) region. Really :gb_con should be a sub-region of :gb_eng, if I understand correctly (I'm American so I might have my names/regions wrong).

I'll need to think about this as well, as I can definitely see a use for it but up to this stage we haven't needed to do it. In our current nomenclature we would want to do something like :gb_eng_con to indicate that 'Cornwall' belonged as a sub-region of :gb_eng but I don't think our current logic will allow that.

These are a reasonable requests. I'm going to leave this open as a feature request and work on it in the near future, I think it's doable. No timeframe at this time, though.

[Jason Lee]

If you have the countries gem installed then you can do something like this...

Holidays.available_regions.sort.uniq.map{|r| 
   ISO3166::Country[r] ? [ ISO3166::Country[r].name , r ] : nil }.compact.sort_by{|a| a[0]}

=> [["Argentina", :ar], ["Austria", :at], ["Australia", :au], .....

BTW, 'Christmas Day' does not seem to be listed as a holiday for Australia (:au).

[Phil Peble]

@jlsync Hm, interesting! Unfortunately one problem is that not all of our regions are currently ISO compatible, I don't think. Since I've taken over any new regions must be and I've been correcting them as I've found issues but I would have to do an audit to figure out which ones are 'incorrect' currently. Still a good option to have, though. Thank you!

To your second point, bah! I missed this in past refactorings. I'm going to create another issue so I don't lose track of it. Thank you!

[Martin Gjaldbaek]

I went through the symbols and found the names for each of them and put them in a hash in this gist. (It's already slightly out of date with the latest changes to the definitions from a month ago but should be quite fast to clean it up).

A bit of feedback about things I discovered while going through the list:

Duplicates

• Isle of Man is listed as both :im and :gb_iom (seems to be on purpose, not sure why)
• :es_v (Valencia) and :es_vc (Valencian Community) encode the same data as well
• (Maybe in case there's ever another refactor, aliases could be supported, so a region can have multiple names and codes, but there's also a way to get a listing without duplication?)
• Localisation has somehow snuck its way in as separate symbols for a couple of countries, Belgium and Bulgaria, with the symbols :be_fr, :be_nl, and :bg_bg, :bg_en even though they (as far as I can tell) encode exactly the same holidays.

Very detailed sub-regions and organizations

• Not a bug per se, but at least for my use cases I don't want to ask my users if they come from Northern or Southern Tasmania (au_tas_north and au_tas_south) - if the level of detail you care about is only country and state, but not further down than that, then stick to only the :xx and :xx_xx symbols, but leave out the xx_xx_xx
• Similarly, if a user only wants geographic regions, then they manually have to leave out all the organisation symbols like :nyse (New York Stock Exchange), ecb_target (European Central Bank) and similar. Some kind of categorization of the symbols, so a user of the gem could ask for e.g. 'countries', 'regions', 'sub-regions', 'organizations' separately would be nice.