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Re: [Asrg] Re: Country numbers

2005-12-10 02:47:03
( But "1" is no ISO 3166 country number, or is it ? )

I think that "1" is the country number for the USA!  (It's  
certainly the country
number used for the USA in international phone calling, aren't  
those numbers the
same?)

If http://userpage.chemie.fu-berlin.de/diverse/doc/ISO_3166.html is  
accurate, the USA number is 840, and all the country codes are three  
digits.  (Other references, including at iso.org, also indicate that  
the ISO 3166 numeric codes are all three digits.)  A few start with  
"00" but "001" isn't in the list, though "100" is Bulgaria.

Aha!!  Okay.

As for numbers used for international dialing, I'd gotten the  
(possibly mistaken?) impression somewhere that "00" and "011" are  
pretty common.  

00 and 001 or 011 or 0011 are often used as prefixes to indicate international 
calling (with or without operator assistance), but (for example) in France one 
enters "19" as the prefix for international dialing... so for example, from 
France one might dial 19-1-212-555-1212 for NYC directory assistance.

It would be pretty weird for every country to have a  
different way of doing international dialing.  

Weird, but true... there are some common conventions, but they are by no means 
universal.

(I'm sure there are  
multiple, but to making an effort to make it per-country would just  
be so wrong.)  Also, the international-dialing codes *for* different  
countries vary in length; the USA is "1", others are up to five  
digits according to http://kropla.com/dialcode.htm, though some of  
the longer ones appear to be subsets of others (e.g., "1" for US/ 
Canada/etc followed by an area code for some interesting entity that  
got listed, or "881" for Global Mobile Satellite System followed by  
one or two more digits for a specific system, etc).

Yes, in general there is a "country code" followed (outside the USA) by a "city 
code" which can be one to as many as four or five digits, followed by the local 
phone number.  It is, in fact, rather difficult to try to deterministically 
decide when you have the "whole" required phone number during international 
calling!

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support free and fair US elections!  http://stickers.defend-democracy.org
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.


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