Only that would give you 26*26 possibilities, which wouldn't fit in an
8-bit integer. Valid country codes would fir in one byte, at the moment.
How many million of these are you going to have to make it worth packing?

"Better programming" almost always means clearer programming. Having
individual bytes represent country codes probably isn't going to help.
Having Strings for everything similarly isn't particularly helpful. You
might want to think about a country code (or just country) class. You
can share instances, so if you have lots of references to country codes
you are using 4 or 8 bytes per reference (on a machine with perhaps over
1,000,000,000 bytes available).

import java.util.Map;

public class ISOCountry {
    private static final Map<String,ISOCountry> instances;
    static {
        instances = java.util.HashMap<String,ISOCountry>();
        for (String code : java.util.Local.getISOCountries()) {
            instances.put(code, new ISOCountry(code));
        }
    }
    public static ISOCountry valueOf(String code) {
        ISOCountry country = instances.get(code);
        if (country == null) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException();
        } else {
            return country;
        }
    }

    private final String code;
    private ISOCountry(String code) {
        this.code = code;
    }
    public String getISOCountry() {
        return code;
    }
}

(Disclaimer: Code not tested or even compiled.)

Tom Hawtin

Then store it as an ISO-639-1 language code.

How is an ISO-639-1 language code documented?  I haven't looked it up but
I bet it is simply a two character string.  Therefore you should use the
same.

Hide that in a class if you want, but if a programmer dumps the data then
they should see a two character string.

I'm not sure why there would be any reason to consider anything else in
any normal situation.

$0.10

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:32:27 GMT, Haggis McMutton
<haggis@somewhere.ere> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

You can store it in one byte as an int, or 32 bits as a fixed length
character pair, even longer for a string since you need a length.

It really depends on how many of these you have.  If you have a
database of millions of records it might be worth sweating over.  Most
likely there are tens of thousands of things more deserving of such
detailed attention.

Consider that you can't do much interesting with ad-hoc SQL queries in
int form.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com