faker.location.continent for generating random (real) continents

[joscha]

Clear and concise description of the problem

I am currently generating fake data for results from an OpenAPI spec. The spec has an entity that is location data. It includes a continent. See https://github.com/planet-a-ventures/affinity-node/blob/4df29ba8e97f02715f381da76efe13146463d0a1/openapi/2024-10-08.json#L2827

As a developer using faker I want to be able to generate random continent names.

Suggested solution

A new locations.continent method.

Alternative

No response

Additional context

Implementation is here: #3162

[github-actions]

Thank you for your feature proposal.

We marked it as "waiting for user interest" for now to gather some feedback from our community:

• If you would like to see this feature be implemented, please react to the description with an up-vote (:+1:).
• If you have a suggestion or want to point out some special cases that need to be considered, please leave a comment, so we are aware about them.

We would also like to hear about other community members' use cases for the feature to give us a better understanding of their potential implicit or explicit requirements.

We will start the implementation based on:

• the number of votes (:+1:) and comments
• the relevance for the ecosystem
• availability of alternatives and workarounds
• and the complexity of the requested feature

We do this because:

• There are plenty of languages/countries out there and we would like to ensure that every method can cover all or almost all of them.
• Every feature we add to faker has "costs" associated to it:
  • initial costs: design, implementation, reviews, documentation
  • running costs: awareness of the feature itself, more complex module structure, increased bundle size, more work during refactors

---

View more issues which are waiting for user interest

[ST-DDT]

#3162 (comment)

One lesson we learned for sure is that lot location stuff seems simple, but the usecases vary a lot. Some people might need only the name, others might only need the code, and some need both related to each other (e.g. countries).

I did a quick google search and found this list of continent codes.

• https://github.com/datasets/continent-codes/blob/main/data/continent-codes.csv
• https://datahub.io/core/continent-codes

I have yet to check if these are an official thing.
(And I have never heart of them before either)

What do you/the others think?