1 import urllib2 
 2 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup 
 3  
 4 def FetchCountryCodes(): 
 5  """Country Code List: ISO 3166-1993 (E) 
 6 
 7  This international standard provides a two-letter alphabetic code for 
 8  representing the names of countries, dependencies, and other areas of 
 9  special geopolitical interest. The source of this code set is the Codes 
 10  for the Representation of Names of Countries (ISO 3166-1993 (E)). 
 11  """ 
 12  
 13  page = urllib2.urlopen("http://xml.coverpages.org/country3166.html") 
 14  soup = BeautifulSoup(page) 
 15  page.close() 
 16  
 17  countries = [] 
 18  for listrow in soup.html.body.table.findAll('tr')[1:]: 
 19  col1, col2 = listrow.findAll('td') 
 20  code = col1.renderContents() 
 21  name = col2.renderContents() 
 22  countries.append( (code, name) ) 
 23  return countries 
 24  
 25 codes = FetchCountryCodes() 
 26 print codes