Question

How would I put the following information into a Python dictionary — http://userpage.chemie.fu-berlin.de/diverse/doc/ISO_3166.html? Keys would be the country and values would be the two-character ISO code.

For example, I want the result to be:

mapping_of_country_to_iso = {'AALAND ISLANDS':'AX','AFGHANISTAN':'AF',...} 

Answer 1

I just copied and pasted the important data into a text file called ‘countries.txt’ then did something like this:

import string

myFilename = "countries.txt"

myTuples = []


myFile = open (myFilename, 'r')

for line in myFile.readlines():
    splitLine = string.split (line)
    code = splitLine [-3]
    country = string.join(splitLine[:-3])
    myTuples.append(tuple([country, code]))

myDict = dict(myTuples)
print myDict

It’s probably not the “best” way to do it, but it seems to work.

Here it is following John Machin’s helpful recommendations:

import string

myFilename = "countries.txt"


myDict = {}

myFile = open (myFilename, 'r')

for line in myFile:
    splitLine = string.split (line)
    code = splitLine [-3]
    country = " ".join(splitLine[:-3])
    myDict[country] = code

print myDict