REST Countries

Mode: 🌐 Public · Domain: restcountries.com

Look up countries by name (substring match) and list every country in a region. REST Countries is a free public country-metadata registry covering ISO codes, capitals, languages, currencies, lat/lon, timezones, UN membership, and more.

Commands

Command	Description
opencli rest-countries country <name>	Look up countries by common / official name
opencli rest-countries region <region>	List every country in a region

Usage Examples

# Name search (substring, returns 1 or many)
opencli rest-countries country japan
opencli rest-countries country "united kingdom"
opencli rest-countries country guinea          # matches Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, etc.

# Region listing (sorted by population desc)
opencli rest-countries region europe
opencli rest-countries region asia --limit 20
opencli rest-countries region oceania

Output Columns

Both commands share the same column set:

Column	Description
rank	Population rank within the response
commonName / officialName	Common and official country names
cca2 / cca3 / ccn3	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 / alpha-3 / numeric codes
capital	Comma-joined capitals (most countries have 1, but South Africa has 3)
region / subregion	Geographic region & subregion
population / area	Population (people), area (km²)
languages	Comma-joined official language names
currencies	Comma-joined CODE (Name) pairs
latitude / longitude	Country centroid in decimal degrees
timezones	Comma-joined UTC offsets
independent / unMember / landlocked	Boolean flags
flag	Unicode flag emoji
url	REST Countries alpha/<cca3> lookup URL

Options

country

Option	Description
name (positional)	Country name (substring match across common & official names)
--limit	Max rows (1–250, default: 25)

region

Option	Description
region (positional)	One of: africa, americas, asia, europe, oceania, antarctic (case-insensitive)
--limit	Max rows (1–250, default: 250)

Notes

• Population-sorted by default. Both country and region sort responses by population descending so the most-populous match appears at rank 1. This makes rest-countries country guinea --limit 1 reliably surface Guinea (the country) rather than Guinea-Bissau or Papua New Guinea.
• languages / currencies are comma-joined, not nested objects. REST Countries' raw shape is {eng: 'English'} / {USD: {name, symbol}}; we flatten to 'English' / 'USD (United States dollar)' for agent-readable rows.
• capital is comma-joined, since some countries have multiple capitals (e.g. South Africa: Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein).
• independent / unMember / landlocked are tri-state (boolean or null) — REST Countries doesn't fill them for every entity (rare territories may omit).
• No API key required. REST Countries' free tier is very generous; bursts → CommandExecutionError.
• Errors. Empty name / unknown region / bad limit → ArgumentError; unknown name (HTTP 404) → EmptyResultError; transport / 429 / non-200 → CommandExecutionError.