In release 4.2 the #name attribute was deprecated in favour of #iso_short_name and we added the #iso_long_name attribute, to make it clear that these attributes use the ISO3166 names, and are not the "common names" most people might expect, eg: The ISO name for "United Kingdom" is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", but if you're building a dropdown box to select a country, you're likely expecting to see "United Kingdom" instead.
"Common names" in English have been available in the translation data, via #translation('en'). As of release 4.2, a shortcut method has been added for simplicity, #common_name, which delegates to #translation('en').
For additional clarity, the #names method, which was an alias to #unofficial_names has also been deprecated, together with the finder methods that use name or names attributes.
The #name and #names attributes, and corresponding finder methods were removed in 5.0.
The replacement finders added in 5.0 are:
#find_by_name=>#find_by_any_name- Searches all the name attributes, same as before#find_by_names=>#find_by_unofficial_names#find_*_by_name=>#find_*_by_any_name#find_*_by_names=>#find_*_by_unofficial_names
With the addition of the new name attributes, there are now also the following finders:
#find_by_common_name/#find_*_by_common_name#find_by_iso_short_name/#find_*_by_iso_short_name#find_by_iso_long_name/#find_*_by_iso_long_name
For translated country names, we use data originally sourced from pkg-isocodes, via the i18n_data gem, and these generally correspond to the expected "common names". Some corrections have been applied to these localized names. The methods to access translated names have not been changed.
The 5.0 release removed support for Ruby 2.5 (EOL 2021-03-01) and 2.6 (EOL 2022-03-31)
In release 5.1 a type attribute was added to the subdivisions object, to allow filtering the collection of subdivisions.
Country#subdivision_typesreturns a list of subdivision types for that country (lowercase, snake_cased)#subdivisions_of_types(types)accepts an array of subdivision types and returns the subdivisions for those types
The #states method is deprecated to avoid confusion, as this method is an alias to #subdivisions and returns all subdivisions, regardless of type.
To get a list of state subdivisions (something that was not possible before 5.1), use subdivisions_of_types(['state'])
Please note that the subdivision types are obtained from ISO data, and each country defines its own subdivision types, eg: state, district, region, municipality and many others types exist.