I need a list of all the countries

June 29, 2009 1:55 PM

I'm looking for a randomized list of every nation state in the world, preferably in spreadsheet column form. Is there anything like this?
posted by billtron to grab bag (8 answers total)

Depending on what you call a country, this may do: http://openconcept.ca/blog/mgifford/text_list_all_countries

There's a wikipedia page which looks more official, but less easy to copy/paste into excel.
posted by cschneid at 2:00 PM on June 29, 2009

What do u mean "randomized"? This question would make perfect sense to me had that word not been included.
posted by hal_c_on at 2:01 PM on June 29, 2009

Here you go: http://doteatop.pastebin.com/m11cc75c2

Randomized from: http://www.un.org/en/members/index.shtml
posted by doteatop at 2:06 PM on June 29, 2009

doteatop, that's awesome. What's #113?
posted by billtron at 2:10 PM on June 29, 2009

Sorry, a few of those got a bit chopped.

Fixed: http://doteatop.pastebin.com/d32095a92

I did this the fast, evil way:

grep countryname <(HTML_FILE) | awk -F''\''' '{print $12}' | sort -u | while read c ; do echo -e $RANDOM"\t"$c ; done | sort -n | sed -e 's/^[0-9]*//g'
posted by doteatop at 2:14 PM on June 29, 2009

Croatia is missing in the first link, and a few others, like Vatican City and Kosovo. The US Department of State recognizes 194 countries.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 3:13 PM on June 29, 2009

Slightly out of date, but more fun than the above: "Countries of the World..."
posted by dirm at 4:01 PM on June 29, 2009 [2 favorites]

Practice this, and you can name them all off yourself :).
posted by MadamM at 7:37 PM on June 29, 2009