iso3166-scraper

A simple utility for scraping ISO-3166 country data from a Wikipedia article that contains all current country codes, names, etc.

In a recent project, I had a need for the ISO 3166 country code data and was disappointed to discover that there really wasn't a good free source for obtaining the data in structured form. I'm sure there's some place where I could spend money with ISO to get this data, but that's not a great option for an open source project with no revenue stream for such expenses.

However, the above referenced Wikipedia article was pretty cleanly structured and easy enough to scrape. The data changes infrequently, so occasionally running this utility to get the latest data seems like a decent compromise. Maybe you'll find it useful too.

This utility scrapes the web page, and outputs the country code data in JSON and YAML formats.

In addition to the basic country data, the script maps the country codes to the corresponding Unicode code points for each country's flag and includes the appropriate escape sequences in a string property of the output data in every format.

This tool is built using some excellent open source components that make creating tools like this really easy.

• Beautiful Soup -- HTML page scraping
• Requests -- HTTP for Humans
• ruamel.yaml -- YAML reader/writer

Installation

This package is available for installation via PyPI and can therefore be installed using pip as follows.

python3 -m pip install iso3166-scraper

Usage

After installation, you can simply run it.

$ iso3166-scraper
retrieving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes
writing JSON file: ./iso3166.json
writing YAML file: ./iso3166.yml

By default, it fetches the Wikipedia article, scrapes the ISO 3166 country data from the page, and produces JSON and YAML output files in the current directory. Using command line options, you can select which output format you want and where to put it. To see all the options, use

iso3166-scraper --help