title: How to zip two strings?
body: <p>I have two lists:</p>
  
  <pre><code>country_name = ['South Africa', 'India', 'United States']
  country_code = ['ZA', 'IN', 'US']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to group the country name and its corresponding code together and then perform a sort operation to do some processing</p>
  
  <p>When I tried to zip these 2 lists, I am getting the 1st character from both the lists as the output.  </p>
  
  <p>I also tried doing this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>for i in xrange(0,len(country_code):
       zipped = zip(country_name[i][:],country_code[i][:])
       ccode.append(zipped)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>to zip the entire string, but it didn't work. Also I am not sure that after zipping the 2 list, I will be able to sort the resulting list or not.</p>