Getting Started with RESTCountries.NET

In this article, Let me show you my open source Nuget package RESTCountries.NET developed in .NET Standard.

RESTCountries.NET is a .NET Standard wrapper library around the API provided by REST Countries(https://restcountries.eu).

htpps://restcountries.eu is a RESTful API which provides information about countries such as name , capital city , population , currencies ,borders info , languages , flag , calling codes , etc.

With RESTCountries.NET , we can:

• Retrieve a list of countries.
• Get a list of country names in others languages such as German , Spanish , French , Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Croatian , Japanese , Breton , and Persian language.
• Search by country name.
• Search by capital city.
• Search by ISO 4217 currency code.
• Search by continent: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania.
• Search by regional bloc.
• Apply filters to retrieve what we need.
• etc.

Setup

• The library is available on NuGet at https://www.nuget.org/packages/RESTCountries.NET/
• Install it into your .NET project(.NET Standard, .NET Core, Xamarin, etc).

Usage

• Add namespace

	// Add namespace
	using RESTCountries.Services;

view raw add-namesapace.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

• Get all countries

	// Get all countries
	List<Country> countries = await RESTCountriesAPI.GetAllCountriesAsync();

view raw get-all-countries.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Each method return an object of type Country or a List of Country. You can apply filters on the returned value to retrieve what you need.

• Get a list of country names

	// Get a list of country names
	var all = await RESTCountriesAPI.GetAllCountriesAsync();
	List<string> countries = all.Select(c => c.Name).ToList();

view raw get-country-name-list.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Country names are in English by default.

• Retrieve a list of country names in Spanish

	// Get all countries in Spanish language
	var countries = await RESTCountriesAPI.GetAllCountriesAsync();
	List<string> countriesInSpanish = countries.Select(c => c.Translations.Es).ToList();

view raw NamesInSpanish.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Available languages are: de(German language), es(Spanish language), fr(French language), ja(Japanese language), it(Italian language), br(Breton language), pt(Portuguese language), nl(Dutch language), hr(Croatian language) and fa(Persian language).

• Search by country partial name or full name

	// Search by country name
	List<Country> result = await RESTCountriesAPI.GetCountriesByNameContainsAsync(string name);
	// Search by country full name
	Country country = await RESTCountriesAPI.GetCountryByFullNameAsync(string fullName);

view raw search-by-name.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The first method could return a list of countries or a list of one element.

• Search by continent: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania

	// Search by continent: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania
	List<Country> result = await RESTCountriesAPI.GetCountriesByContinentAsync(string continent);

view raw search-by-continent.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Possibles values of “continent” are Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania.

For more information, check out the full documentation at https://github.com/egbakou/RESTCountries.NET

Conclusion

In web applications(.NET or .NET Core) RESTCountries.NET allows us to populate country select tag options dynamically. Populate Xamarin Picker with a list of countries become easy.