I'm going to use the USPS API for international shipping rates, but the list they provide is nearly 500 countries long. The listings include:
Fernando Po (Equatorial Guinea)
Hashemite Kingdom (Jordan)
Muscat (Oman)
Nauru
Negri Sembilan (Malaysia)
And they all work as listed to provide postal rates.
But the list seems REALLY long.
I wondered if anyone had any suggestions about a shorter list?
I actually once went through that "list" (those tons of pages) manually, removed duplicates, renamed references, etc. and correlated them with ISO codes for a shipping cache Java application I wrote recently. I never finished it; I ended up not using it in the end.
I found a much easier way to get their list was to start from the other end: just steal it from USPS itself. Go to their international rate calculator and view the source for the select box. A couple regular expressions should then have you on your way. It may not be completely up-to-date, I wouldn't be surprised if another department or different people maintained the two lists, but it should be pretty close.