Introduction

This package is a collection of flags for geographic region and sub-region codes. The regions are based on the data from BCP 47 and selected sub-regions (US states, Canadian provinces and territories, and some sub-regions of Great Britain) are based on ISO 3166-2:US, ISO 3166-2:CA, and ISO-3166-2:GB.

Most people think of these regions from BCP 47 as country flags, but there are a few codes / flags that do not correspond to countries. The flags are in SVG and PNG format and named by their BCP 47 region code, which for countries is the same as ISO 3166-2 country code. In case of sub-regions, ISO 3166-2 is used for naming the files; e.g.

US-DE.png

The canonical way to get all BCP 47 region codes is to look for records in

language-subtag-registry

Type: region
Subtag: [A-Z]{2}
AND NOT Description: Private use
AND NOT Deprecated: .*

Regions not in that repository can be added to

language-subtag-private

Some regions do not have their own flag. In such cases, they are symlinked to the best flag to represent them, which in most cases is the flag of their regional or political parent. These are listed in file

ALIASES

The sub-regions currently covered are:

• US states and the District of Columbia
• Canadian provinces and territories
• Countries of England, Scotland, and Wales in Great Britain
• The province Northern Ireland in Great Britain

The flags are downloaded from Wikipedia. When Wikipedia flags were copyrighted, we worked we Wikipedia editors to either relicense them, or drew / sourced and uploaded new public-domain versions. In particular, the license for these flags were resolved for the initial import:

• Montenegro
• Nicaragua
• Sint Maarten
• Ascension Island
• Lesotho
• Kosovo

Scripts

• The script

  regions.py

  lists all regions and some selected sub-regions with their metadata.
• The script

  regions-wp.py

  shows the Wikipedia URL for the flag page.
• The script

  missing.sh

  shows all such regions that we don't have flags for.
• The script

  make-aliases.sh

  makes symlinks for regions that use flag of another region.
• The script

  download-wp.py

  downloads missing flags from Wikipedia and generating optimized SVG and PNG versions.

You can use the waveflag script from the Noto fonts project to wave PNG flags.

Requirements

• Python 3

• dos2unix

• rsvg-convert

  part of

  librsvg

• optipng

Updating

If new regions are needed, update

language-subtag-registry

language-subtag-private

data/ALIASES

data/ALIASES-WP

If a specific flag on Wikipedia flag is under Creative Commons, work with Wikipedia editors to relicense it to public domain. If the flag is not explicitly marked

public_domain

COPYING

To download missing flags, run

download-wp.py

To update to latest flags from Wikipedia, delete the

html

svg

png

make-aliases.sh

download-wp.py

License

See file

COPYING