countrycode standardizes country names, converts them into ~40 different coding schemes, and assigns region descriptors. Scroll down for more details or visit the countrycode CRAN page

If you use countrycode in your research, we would be very grateful if you could cite our paper:

Arel-Bundock, Vincent, Nils Enevoldsen, and CJ Yetman, (2018). countrycode: An R package to convert country names and country codes. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(28), 848, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00848

Different data sources use different coding schemes to represent countries (e.g. CoW or ISO). This poses two main problems: (1) some of these coding schemes are less than intuitive, and (2) merging these data requires converting from one coding scheme to another, or from long country names to a coding scheme.

The countrycode function can convert to and from 40+ different country coding schemes, and to 600+ variants of country names in different languages and formats. It uses regular expressions to convert long country names (e.g. Sri Lanka) into any of those coding schemes or country names. It can create new variables with various regional groupings.

From the R console, type:

install.packages("countrycode")

To install the latest development version, you can use the remotes package:

library(remotes)
install_github('vincentarelbundock/countrycode')

To get an up-to-date list of supported country codes, install the package and type ?codelist. These include:

• 600+ variants of country names in different languages and formats.
• AR5
• Continent and region identifiers.
• Correlates of War (numeric and character)
• European Central Bank
• EUROCONTROL - The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation
• Eurostat
• Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
• Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL)
• Geopolitical Entities, Names and Codes (GENC)
• Gleditsch & Ward (numeric and character)
• International Civil Aviation Organization
• International Monetary Fund
• International Olympic Committee
• ISO (2/3-character and numeric)
• Polity IV
• United Nations
• United Nations Procurement Division
• Varieties of Democracy
• World Bank
• World Values Survey
• Unicode symbols (flags)