I’ve been searching for university names database, but i didn’t find complete database that covers at least universities in 240 countries. I decide to crawl university names in LinkedIn and Webometric, since both give university names based on country code. If you are in hurry to get university names database, you can download them here. If you are interested to know how to crawl the LinkedIn and Webometric university names data and build the database, then hang on with me.

I used Python to crawl LinkedIn and Webometric. It was accidental, when i edit my profile on my LinkedIn, firebug shows ajax get request to populate university names on select element. So here is my python code to get LinkedIn university names based on country code:

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import urllib
from xml.dom import minidom
import MySQLdb
 
WS_URL = 'http://www.linkedin.com/wsSchoolDir?q=&country=%s'
DB_HOST = 'localhost'
DB_NAME = 'bell'
DB_USER = 'root'
DB_PASSWD = '123456'
TBL_COUNTRY = 'countries'
COUNTRY_ID = 'id'
COUNTRY_CODE = 'iso2'
TBL_SCHOOL = 'universities'
 
def buildSchools():
    conn = MySQLdb.connect(
        host = DB_HOST, 
        user = DB_USER, 
        passwd = DB_PASSWD,
        db = DB_NAME,
        charset = 'utf8'
    )
    print "Creating table %sn" % TBL_SCHOOL
    cursor = conn.cursor()
    cursor.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS %s" % (TBL_SCHOOL))
    cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE %s(`id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,`country_id` INT(5) NOT NULL,`name` VARCHAR(150) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `country_id` (`country_id`)) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8" % (TBL_SCHOOL))
 
    print "Get countries from table %snn" % TBL_COUNTRY
    cursor.execute("SELECT %s, %s FROM %s WHERE 1" % (COUNTRY_ID, COUNTRY_CODE, TBL_COUNTRY))
    countries = cursor.fetchall()
 
    print "Trying to build schools..n"
    for country in countries:
        print "Populate schools in %sn" % country[1]
        schools = getSchools(country[1].lower())
        for school in schools:
            if len(school.getAttribute('v')) > 0 and school.getAttribute('v') != '0':
                univ = school.childNodes[0].data.replace('"', '\"')
                cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO %s VALUES(NULL, %d, "%s")''' % (TBL_SCHOOL, country[0], univ))
    print "nEnd building schools."
    cursor.close()
    conn.close()
 
def getSchools(code):
    dom = minidom.parse(urllib.urlopen(WS_URL % code))
    return dom.getElementsByTagName('s')
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    buildSchools()

I got 9,229 university names from LinkedIn. In case you are curious how the code operates, it just iterate country code (2 digit code) in my countries table and requests the web service URL based on that country code. The web service will return XML containing universities name and, i guest, their id. The code then parse the XML, iterates each university names and insert it to table universities. Webometric is more complete than LinkedIn, I got 16,773 university names. Webometric provides catalogue of world universities consisting html pages of university names based on country code. Basically, crawling proccess is the same, request each html page of country and parse the university name and, this is the bonus, university url. Each country might be more than one page consisting 50 universities per page. This time i used SGMLParser to parse html page. So here’s the code:

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from sgmllib import SGMLParser
from urllib2 import urlopen, Request, BaseHandler
from httplib import BadStatusLine
import time
import MySQLdb
 
WS_URL = 'http://www.webometrics.info/university_by_country.asp?country=%s'
DB_HOST = 'localhost'
DB_NAME = 'bell'
DB_USER = 'root'
DB_PASSWD = '123456'
TBL_COUNTRY = 'countries'
COUNTRY_ID = 'id'
COUNTRY_CODE = 'iso2'
TBL_SCHOOL = 'webometric_universities'
 
class UnivParser(SGMLParser):
    domain = 'http://www.webometrics.info/'
    path = '/university_by_country.asp?country=%s'
    univ = []
    errorURL = []
 
    insideRowData = 0
    insideColOfUnivName = 0
    passedColOfUnivName = 0
    insideColOfUnivLink = 0
    insideUnivLink = 0
    currentUniv = {}
 
    sleepCount = 1;
    insideColNav = 0
    insideLinkOfNav = 0
    currentLinkOfNav = ''
 
    nextPage = ''
    pageNumber = 1
    endOfPage = 0
 
    def __init__(self):
        SGMLParser.__init__(self, verbose=0)
 
    def parse(self, url):
        self.univ = []
        self.pageNumber = 1 
        self.goToNextPage(url)
        return self.univ
 
    def goToNextPage(self, url):
        print "crawl page %d" % self.pageNumber
 
        self.insideRowData = 0
        self.insideColOfUnivName = 0
        self.passedColOfUnivName = 0
        self.insideColOfUnivLink = 0
        self.insideUnivLink = 0
        self.currentUniv = {}
 
        self.insideColNav = 0
        self.insideLinkOfNav = 0
        self.currentLinkOfNav = ''
 
        self.nextPage = ''
        self.endOfPage = 0
 
        try:
            req = urlopen(url)
        except IOError, e:
            print "Oops, we got HTTPError."
            reason = ""
            if hasattr(e, 'reason'):
                reason = 'Failed to reach a server. Reason: %d' % e.reason
            elif hasattr(e, 'code'):
                reason = 'The server couldn't fulfill the request. Error code: %d' % e.code
            print reason
            self.errorURL.append({'url': url, 'reason': reason})
            return
        except BadStatusLine, e:
            reason = ""
            if hasattr(e, 'reason'):
                reason = 'Failed to reach a server. Reason: %d' % e.reason
            elif hasattr(e, 'code'):
                reason = 'The server couldn't fulfill the request. Error code: %d' % e.code
            print reason
            self.errorURL.append({'url': url, 'reason': reason})
            return
        finally:
            self.sleepCount = 1
 
        self.feed(req.read())
        req.close()
 
        if len(self.nextPage):
            self.goToNextPage(self.domain + self.nextPage)
 
    def __sleep(self):
        time.sleep(0.5 * self.sleepCount)
 
    def getErrorURL(self):
        return self.errorURL
 
    def start_tr(self, attrs):
        if self.insideRowData == 0:
            for name, val in attrs:
                if name == 'class' and val == 'nav6a':
                    self.insideRowData = 1
 
    def start_td(self, attrs):
        if self.insideRowData:
            if self.passedColOfUnivName == 0: 
                self.insideColOfUnivName = 1
            else:
                self.insideColOfUnivLink = 1
        else: # inside col of nav
            for name, val in attrs:
                if name == 'class' and val == 'nav6a':
                    self.insideColNav = 1
 
    def start_a(self, attrs):
        if self.insideColOfUnivName:
            self.insideUnivLink = 1
        elif self.insideColNav:
            for name, val in attrs:
                if name == 'class' and val == 'nav6a':
                    self.insideLinkOfNav = 1
                if name == 'href':
                    self.currentLinkOfNav = val
 
    def end_tr(self):
        if self.insideRowData:
            self.insideRowData = 0
            self.passedColOfUnivName = 0
            self.univ.append( self.currentUniv )
            self.currentUniv = {}
 
    def end_td(self):
        if self.insideRowData:
            if self.insideColOfUnivName:
                self.insideColOfUnivName = 0
                self.passedColOfUnivName = 1
            else:
                self.insideColOfUnivLink = 0
        elif self.insideColNav:
            self.insideColNav = 0
 
    def end_a(self):
        if  self.insideUnivLink:
            self.insideUnivLink = 0
        elif self.insideLinkOfNav:
            self.insideLinkOfNav = 0
            self.currentLinkOfNav = ''
 
    def handle_data(self, data):
        if self.insideUnivLink:
            self.currentUniv['name'] = unicode( data.strip().replace('"', '\"'), 'latin-1')
            print self.currentUniv['name']
        elif self.insideColOfUnivLink:
            self.currentUniv['link'] = u'%s' % data.strip()
        elif self.insideLinkOfNav and data.lower() == 'next' and self.nextPage == '':
            self.nextPage = self.currentLinkOfNav
            self.pageNumber += 1
 
def buildSchools():
    conn = MySQLdb.connect(
        host = DB_HOST, 
        user = DB_USER, 
        passwd = DB_PASSWD,
        db = DB_NAME,
        charset = 'latin1'
    )
    print "Creating table %sn" % TBL_SCHOOL
    cursor = conn.cursor()
    cursor.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS %s" % (TBL_SCHOOL))
    cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE %s(`id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,`country_id` INT(5) NOT NULL,`name` VARCHAR(150) NOT NULL, `url` VARCHAR(150) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `country_id` (`country_id`)) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8" % (TBL_SCHOOL))
 
    print "Get countries from table %snn" % TBL_COUNTRY
    cursor.execute("SELECT %s, %s FROM %s WHERE 1" % (COUNTRY_ID, COUNTRY_CODE, TBL_COUNTRY))
    countries = cursor.fetchall()
 
    w = UnivParser()
 
    print "Trying to build schools from webometric..n"
    for country in countries:
        print "nPopulate schools in %s" % country[1]
        schools = w.parse(WS_URL % country[1].lower())
        for school in schools:
            cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO %s VALUES(NULL, %d, "%s", "%s")''' % (TBL_SCHOOL, country[0], school['name'], school['link']))
    print "nEnd building schools."
 
    """ print error """
    for err in w.getErrorURL():
        print "%sn" % err
 
    w.close()
    cursor.close()
    conn.close()
 
def insertSchools(url, cc):
    conn = MySQLdb.connect(
        host = DB_HOST, 
        user = DB_USER, 
        passwd = DB_PASSWD,
        db = DB_NAME,
        charset = 'latin1'
    )
    cursor = conn.cursor()
    cursor.execute("SELECT %s FROM %s WHERE iso2 = '%s'" % (COUNTRY_ID, TBL_COUNTRY, cc.upper()))
    country = cursor.fetchall()
 
    w = UnivParser()
    schools = w.parse(url)
    for school in schools:
        cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO %s VALUES(NULL, %d, "%s", "%s")''' % (TBL_SCHOOL, country[0][0], school['name'], school['link']))
    print "nEnd building schools."
 
    """ print error """
    for err in w.getErrorURL():
        print "%sn" % err
 
    w.close()
    cursor.close()
    conn.close()
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    buildSchools()

Sorry, if the code is messed up. Since i didn’t care about error handling, you might encounter some problems when running the scripts.