In some application or scenarios, it might make the most sense to let users input a country with free-text, instead of a dropdown. Can be for legacy reasons, or for certain use cases.
This can however become problematic if you need to somehow verify that the input is correct, or translate it to multiple languages, or sync the data between systems, some which might have stricter validation than your systems.
We have built an endpoint for this exact purpose: Country Matcher. It takes an input of a string, and returns to you the best match in the country database, it will adjust for typos, and even look for translated versions, so users can write the country name in english, chinese, or even emoji 🇺🇸 and you can get back the ISO3166 code, and more!