For businesses based in the EU, it's important for VAT purposes to know whether your customers are also based in the EU. As usual, a quick Google search did not reveal a usable list of EU countries by ISO 3166 Alpha-2 code, so I whipped up my own.

european_union_countries = ('AT', 'BE', 'BG', 'CY', 'CZ', 'DK', 'EE', 'FI', 'FR', 'DE', 'GR', 'HU', 'IE', 'IT', 'LV', 'LT', 'LU', 'MT', 'NL', 'PL', 'PT', 'RO', 'SK', 'SI', 'ES', 'SE', 'GB',)

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Introducing Open Country Codes: easy to use ISO 3166 country codes for your apps.

Why are some things just much harder than they need to be? Finding a current, easy-to-use data source for populating a country selection box, for example.

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