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pythoniso-639

Convert ISO 639-1 to ISO 639-2

I need to take an ISO 639-1 code such as en-GB and convert it into an ISO 639-2 code such as eng.

I have looked at the following libraries, but did not find a documented means to perform that transformation in any of them:

Have I missed something? That is - is this possible with any of these libraries?

Solution

  • You can use pycountry for what you want. Do note that if you want the reverse scenario (ISO 639-2 to ISO 639-1) it may not always work because while there should always be a mapping from an ISO 639-1 language code to ISO 639-2, the reverse is not guaranteed.

    import pycountry

code = 'en-GB'

# ISO 639-1 codes are always 2-letter codes, so you have to take
# the first two characters of the code

# This is a safer way to extract the country code from something
# like en-GB (thanks ivan_pozdeev)
lang_code = code[:code.index('-')] if '-' in code else code

lang = pycountry.languages.get(iso639_1_code=lang_code)
print("ISO 639-1 code: " + lang.iso639_1_code)
print("ISO 639-2 code: " + lang.iso639_2T_code)
print("ISO 639-3 code: " + lang.iso639_3_code)

    The above should print out:

    ISO 639-1 code: en
ISO 639-2 code: eng
ISO 639-3 code: eng