How to extract countries from a text?

Question

I use Python 3 (I also have Python 2 installed) and I want to extract countries or cities from a short text. For example, text = "I live in Spain" or text = "United States (New York), United Kingdom (London)".

The answer for countries:

Spain
[United States, United Kingdom]

I tried to install geography but I am unable to run pip install geography. I get this error:

Collecting geography Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement geography (from versions: ) No matching distribution found for geography

It looks like geography only works with Python 2.

I also have geopandas, but I don't know how to extract the required info from text using geopandas.

@MaxiMouse: ok, then should this be closed as typo? Also, you could add that as answer. — smci, Apr 20 '20 at 23:38
@smci Yes, it should probably be closed as a typo. I don't think this could be an answer. — MaxiMouse, Apr 21 '20 at 07:50
@MaxiMouse: on reflection, the question asks the broader *"How to extract countries from a text?"*, isn't strictly tied to any package, and has good answers, so we should let it stand. — smci, Apr 21 '20 at 08:20

score 15 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 09 '19 at 04:23

15

you could use pycountry for your task (it also works with python 3):

pip install pycountry

import pycountry
text = "United States (New York), United Kingdom (London)"
for country in pycountry.countries:
    if country.name in text:
        print(country.name)

edited Mar 09 '19 at 04:23

TerryA

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answered Feb 04 '18 at 11:21

matyas

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Cool. But it will not work with abbreviations, right? Do you know something additional for recognizing abbreviations and passing them to country names? – Markus Feb 04 '18 at 11:25
For example, `BVI` -> `British Virgin Islands` – Markus Feb 04 '18 at 11:27
1

every country object has the attributes alpha_2 and alpha_3 which are abbreviations of the country. (E.g: Germany.alpha_2 = DE, Germany.alpha_3 = DEU) – matyas Feb 04 '18 at 11:31
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I hope that that can cover your use case see also: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pycountry – matyas Feb 04 '18 at 11:32
British Virgin Islands is in pycountry, but it's code is as `alpha_3='VGB', alpha_2='VG'` @Markus – Todd Apr 20 '20 at 17:39
'Korea' is also not recognized. – Steven Van Dorpe Aug 17 '20 at 05:18

Jendoubi Zaid · Answer 2 · 2020-04-20T18:04:07.337

3

There is a newer version for this library that supports python3 named geograpy3

pip install geograpy3

It allows you to extract place names from a URL or text, and add context to those names -- for example distinguishing between a country, region or city.

Example:

import geograpy
import nltk
nltk.download('punkt')
nltk.download('averaged_perceptron_tagger')
nltk.download('maxent_ne_chunker')
nltk.download('words')
url = 'http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26919928'
places = geograpy.get_place_context(url=url)

You can find more details under this link:

edited Apr 20 '20 at 18:04

answered Apr 20 '20 at 17:21

Jendoubi Zaid

119
1
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I've seen this exact text many times "Geograpy allows you to extract place names from a URL or text", but all websites / forums / github project examples show only how to use Geograpy with url and I haven't come across an example with a regular string (neither does it work if we just replace the url in the example code with a regular text) – Mihaela May 13 '21 at 20:18

How to extract countries from a text?

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