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Country Name

name_to_alpha2 takes in a string and searches for a corresponding alpha-2 code in the database for both common and official country names in 34 different languages. If no match is found, None is returned.

The function includes a use_fuzzy=True option, which enables fuzzy lookup to match various name variations such as Germany Federal Republic of and minor misspellings such as Swizerland. Although using fuzzy lookup may incur a significant performance cost of approximately 100x slower than the normal lookup, it is capable of capturing virtually all variations of country names. It is recommended to enable the fuzzy option whenever speed is not a critical factor, as it typically takes around 50ms to return a result on an average desktop computer.

Usage Example

Basic Usage
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import countrywrangler as cw

alpha2 = cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Germany")
print(alpha2)

>>> DE
Different Inputs
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import countrywrangler as cw

print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Germany"))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Federal Republic of Germany"))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Deutschland"))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Alemannia"))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Not a country"))     # Not a country name!
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2(123456677))           # Not a country name!

>>> DE
>>> DE
>>> DE
>>> DE
>>> None
>>> None
Fuzzy Lookup
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import countrywrangler as cw

print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Federal Republic of Germany", use_fuzzy=True))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Germany Federal Republic of", use_fuzzy=True))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Germany Federal Republic", use_fuzzy=True))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Swizerland", use_fuzzy=True))

>>> DE
>>> DE
>>> DE
>>> CH

print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Federal Republic of Germany", use_fuzzy=False))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Germany Federal Republic of", use_fuzzy=False))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Germany Federal Republic", use_fuzzy=False))
print(cw.Normalize.name_to_alpha2("Swizerland", use_fuzzy=False))

>>> DE
>>> None
>>> None
>>> None

Supported Languages

Name Code
Arabic ar
Armenian hy
Basque eu
Bulgarian bg
Chinese (simplified) zh
Chinese (traditional) zh-tw
Croatian hr
Czech cs
Danish da
Dutch nl
English en
Esperanto eo
Estonian et
Finnish fi
French fr
German de
Greek el
Hungarian hu
Italian it
Japanese ja
Korean ko
Lithuanian lt
Norwegian no
Polish pl
Portuguese pt
Romanian ro
Russian ru
Serbian sr
Slovak sk
Slovenian sl
Spanish es
Swedish sv
Thai th
Ukrainian uk