[Ctn-crosscom] ISO alpha-2 & alpha-3 codes

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

All,

A word of caution. In the discussion about ISO codes people mention
alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes. Note that this only means the form of the
code element, it doesn't says a lot about the type of the code.

For alpha-2 codes there are the (1) Official Assigned and (2) Reserved
codes. There are different types of reservation possible but the most
important to note is that "While a code is reserved it will not be
used in the standard to represent a country".

In general, only official assigned codes are used for ccTLDs (although
there are exceptions).

The Glossary on the ISO site
<http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes_glossary.html> gives more
details about the definitions of the types. And of course the standard
itself.


It is possible to find out which the various reserved alpha-2 codes
are via the Online Browsing Platform (OBP) ISO
<https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#home> but the list of reserved alpha-3
codes is as far as I know not publicly available.

Regards,

	jaap