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Some time ago I put together a DOC file for the Palm Pilot that contains a detailed database of international telephone dialing prefixes, or "country codes." You'll need a DOC reader, such as TealDoc, cSpotRun, or ZDOC, in order to view and search through the file, but every Palm user should install a DOC reader, since it is an industry standard, and there is an abundance of content to take advantage of, from reference databases, to e-books. Take a look at MemoWare for a great listing of DOC files.

My country codes database offers more functionality than other stand-alone databases that are also available on PalmGear. See the readme file for more detailed information about how to take advantage of the powerful searching features built-in to this DOC file.

The inspiration for this piece of software actually came in the summer of 2000, when I found myself in Harvard Square, with a piece of paper telling me the identity of my freshman year roommate at Harvard. While his name was correct the address was quite a mystery providing only the following information:
ul. Helska 3/4
81-718 Sopot
8 58 5501115

While I gathered that the first line was the street address, the second the city, and the third a telephone number, it was not possible to determine what country he was from! After exhausting the country code listings in my Filofax organizer, and the AT&T information line (there are no countries with a dialing prefix of either 8 or 858, although for a short time I entertained the possibility that the 8 was completely spurious and he was from Venezuela, which as the prefix 58) I ended up a the Globe Corner Bookstore. In the meantime a database on my Palm Pilot told me that 858 was the area code for La Jolla, California, a sea-side resort town, which seemed the most likely possibility. However, as his last name sounded Polish, I looked up "Sopot" in the Polish travel guides, and although the first few didn't mention it, one finally noted that Sopot was a sea-side resort town in the North of Poland, near Gdansk. It didn't take much time to cross the bookstore, find a telephone directory, and determine that the country code for Poland is 48, and the city code for Sopot is 58. Mystery solved. But I felt that there had to be a better way, and my Palm Pilot should have been able to help out. That's the genesis of this DOC file.

I hope that it's helpful to you. Please send me any comments that you have and alert me to any errors that you might find.

The current version of the country codes database file is 1.3, and was last revised on 5 September 2002