2.1. Start to code

Create a new Google Colab notebook

1. Problem and solution description

2. Practice

Finding all countries names

The following steps will serve as a guideline to find all pairs from five selected countries:

Create a new notebook using the Google Colab environment.
Read data and create a data frame using the table with the names of the available countries from the WITS site:

The information from the previous site could be transformed into a table format (pandas data frame format) with the following command read_html: 'https://wits.worldbank.org/wits/wits/witshelp/content/codes/country_codes.htm'.

Since the variable list_WITS is a list with several data, to select the right data table use the command list_WITS[0]:

import pandas as pd

import ssl

ssl._create_default_https_context = ssl._create_unverified_context

list_WITS = pd.read_html('https://wits.worldbank.org/wits/wits/witshelp/content/codes/country_codes.htm', header=[1])

table_WITS = list_WITS[0]

4. Select the information from the column 'Country Name':

table_WITS['Country Name']

0 Afghanistan

1 Albania

2 Algeria

3 American Samoa

4 Andorra

...

259 Yemen, Rep.

260 Yugoslavia

261 Yugoslavia, FR (Serbia/Montene

262 Zambia

263 Zimbabwe

Name: Country Name, Length: 264, dtype: object

5. Convert the column with the names of the countries into a list using the command list:

country_name_list = list(table_WITS['Country Name'])

['Afghanistan', 'Albania', 'Algeria', 'American Samoa', 'Andorra', 'Angola', ... 'Yugoslavia, FR (Serbia/Montene', 'Zambia', 'Zimbabwe']

6. After creating a list, extract the name of the five selected countries using the operator [0:5] to access just the five first elements in a list:

country_name_list[0:5]

['Afghanistan', 'Albania', 'Algeria', 'American Samoa', 'Andorra']

7. The Python code with all the steps is summarized in this Google Colab (click on the link):

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