Listing regions from a country code

Once and a while you may want to get a collection of the regions that are associated with a country in Magento. For example, the United States is of course a collection of… states. In Magento these are referred to as regions (Japan’s prefectures would hence be referred to as regions as well.)

 

So for a given country (and that country’s ID or country code) you might want to find all the regions in that country. Which are usually used to populate a dropdown menu on the address selection pages or shipping tax pages.

 

$collection = Mage::getModel('directory/region')->getResourceCollection()
->addCountryFilter($this->getCountryId())
->load();

 It’s great when ORM works for a developer. The problem with Magento I find is the complete lack of documentation. I only discovered the above technique after 20 minutes of grepping the app/code/core directory…

foreach($collection as $region) {
    Mage::log(print_r($region, true));
}

 Note some of the more useful attributes of that $region object are:

$region->getData('default_name')
$region->getData('code')

Which give responses along the lines of South Australia and SA, respectively.