Generate ISO Code CSV from Wiki link

get_iso_names_from_wiki.py

# original link found here: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/1047/seeking-full-list-of-iso-alpha-2-and-iso-alpha-3-country-codes
import csv
import urllib.request as urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import sys

# helper function to get text and anchor tag text
# this removes the new line characters, connects all the elements of the column
def format_text(array):
    return ''.join(array).strip()

# get the wiki ISO webpage
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1'
page = opener.open(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.read())

# "Current Codes" is second table on the page
t = soup.findAll('table', {'class' : 'wikitable sortable'})[1]

# create a new CSV for the output
iso_csv = csv.writer(open('wikipedia-iso-country-codes.csv', 'w'))

# get the header rows, write to the CSV
header_row = [format_text(th.findAll(text=True)) for th in t.findAll('th')]
iso_csv.writerow(header_row)

# Iterate over the table pulling out the country table results. Skip the first 
# row as it contains the already-parsed header information.
for row in t.findAll("tr")[1:]:
    tds = row.findAll('td')
    raw_cols = [td.findAll(text=True) for td in tds]
    formatted_cols = [format_text(c) for c in raw_cols]
    iso_csv.writerow(formatted_cols)

Updates today for BeautifulSoup4 and change to page HTML

soup = BeautifulSoup(page.read(), features="html.parser")

t = soup.findAll('table', {'class' : 'wikitable sortable'})[0]