GeoNames Forum

Hi,
I downloaded the list of all countries - country-info.txt
it would be interesting to have alternative country names. similar to what there is for the cities.

eg:
spain, espana, espagne, etc.

no idea how to build this?
thx
colin

Hi, I found the solution. I post it hoping it could help someone.
As mentioned by Marc a while ago (sorry I can;t find the link again):
in alternameNames.txt, there is the list of alternate names for everything in all language.
So, for each country, I get the geonameid, and I grep the associated lines in the alternateNames.txt file.

I focused on language of the country. so the python code end like this:

Code:

 import string, subprocess,pymongo
 
 dbuniverse = pymongo.MongoClient()['UNIVERSE']
 colcountry = dbuniverse['countries']
 altcountryfile = '/Users/colin/Downloads/alternateNames/alternateNames.txt'
 
 cursor = colcountry.find({'ISO':'BE'})
 for doc in cursor:
 	cn=doc['Country']
 	id=doc['geonameid']
 	langs=doc['Languages']
 	print cn,langs
 	for l in langs.split(','):
 		ll=l.split('-')[0]
 		togrep="%s\t%s"%(id,ll)
 		p= subprocess.Popen(['grep',togrep,altcountryfile], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
 		out =p.stdout.readlines()
 		for r in out:
 			data = r.split('\t')
 			alt_n=data[3]
 			print alt_n
 			cursor = colcountry.update({'geonameid':id},{'$addToSet':{'altNames':alt_n}})

GeoNames is really great.