title: How to get the borders of each country
body: <p>I am trying to get the coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the bounding polygon of each country of the world and so far I downloaded this data set
  (<a href="http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php" rel="nofollow">http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php</a>).</p>
  
  <p>And I was able to retrieve the bounding polygon for each country in this way</p>
  
  <pre><code>import shapefile
  sf = shapefile.Reader("TM_WORLD_BORDERS-0.3.sph")
  shapes = sf.shapes()
  
  j = 0 # number of the country
  
  lat = []; lon = []
  for i in range(len(shapes[j].points)):
      lat.append(shapes[j].points[i][0]);lon.append(shapes[j].points[i][1])
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I do not understand how to get the name of the country associated to each polygon. </p>
  
  <p>This may be a very simple question but I really cannot find a solution.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to look at the attributes of shapes, but the name of the country does not seem to be there.</p>
  
  <p>The dataset I've downloaded contains a bunch of other binary files, but I don't really know how they've been written, so I was hoping somebody may be familiar with this dataset of with the shapefile library.</p>