title: Localized states/provinces data
body: <p>I am trying to provide drop down menus so that users can select their country and state in a multilingual web application.</p>
  
  <p>I was able to extract a list of countries and the name of those countries in various languages from unicode.org's cldr files.</p>
  
  <p>Currently these are all stored in arrays in seperate files (I have files such as en.php, es.php, fr.php and so on).</p>
  
  <p>While this doesn't seem too difficult, I am having trouble trying to get a list of Administrative Divions (states/provinces/prefectures) in localized form. Essentially, if the person is using the french version (fr_fr) of the application, I would like that when he selects "France" as his country, the states drop down would be populated with the various french departments in french.</p>
  
  <p>I have found some data on geonames.org: <a href="http://www.geonames.org/GB/administrative-division-united-kingdom.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.geonames.org/GB/administrative-division-united-kingdom.html</a> but all the content seems to be in English, so I can't provide localized states. Additionally, some countries like the UK have 2 sets of data in "Administrative division", which might make grabbing the data automatically somewhat problematic.</p>
  
  <p>Similiar, if someone is using the Japanese version, then the prefecture drop down should contain the prefectures in Japanese. As for the other countries, I think it would be unfeasible to have all administrative divisions translated into Japanese, so defaulting to English is fine.</p>
  
  <p>Additionally, countries have different terms for administrative divisions (states/territory/provinces/prefectures and perhaps some other ones I have missed. I would like to have this data somewhere, so that when someone selets say, Japan, instead of the label being "state" he is presented with the label "prefecture".</p>
  
  <p>Another issue I have is where to store all the data. At the moment I am leaning towards storing the administrative division (state) and label (state,prefecture, etc) in arrays in a more specific file containing the locale (en_US.php, en_GB.php, etc).</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone dealt with something like this on a project? I would love to hear your suggestions/views. Also, it would be great if someone can provide a source where I can get localized states.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Post codes: Some countries don't have post codes, so I need to store this information and make sure the postcode isn't required when submitting.</li>
  <li>Optional states: As mentioned. Some countries don't have states, so this will need to be stored somehow.</li>
  </ul>