Get flag images from Wikipedia

I needed a large number of national flag images at a certain resolution for a project my Web Development course was working on. By examining some flag images I saw on Wikipedia, I noticed that they were creating flag images on the fly.

For example, to create the United Kingdom's flag that is 100 pixels wide, you can access this URL:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg/100px-the_United_Kingdom.png

which produces this flag:

So I developed a Perl script that would automate this process for me. I've included it below for anyone else who might need flag images. Note that I had to set the user agent string, or Wikipedia would not respond properly to the http request. If you use this script to download a lot of images, please be nice throttle your requests with the sleep() command.

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print?

01	#!/usr/bin/perl

02

03	# This script will attempt to download the national flag

04	# produced by Wikipedia using the $flag country name and

05	# $image_size as the image width.  By Frank McCown.

06

07	use LWP::Simple;

08	use HTTP::Response;

09	use strict;

10

11	# Width of the image

12	my $image_size = 100;

13

14	# Country's name

15	my $flag = 'the United Kingdom';

16

17	my $filename = lc $flag;

18	$filename =~ s/\s/_/g;

19	$filename = $filename . "_" . $image_size . ".png";

20

21	my $url_filename = $flag;

22	$url_filename =~ s/\s/_/g;

23

24	my $img_url = "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/Flag_of_" .

25	$url_filename . ".svg/" . $image_size . "px-" . $url_filename . ".png";

26

27	print "Getting $img_url\n";

28

29	my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

30	$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 Firefox 5.6');

31	$ua->from('your@email.com');

32

33	my $response = $ua->get($img_url);

34

35	if ($response->is_success) {

36	print "Writing to $filename\n";

37

38	open(IMG, ">$filename");

39	binmode(IMG);

40	print IMG $response->content;

41	close IMG;

42

}

43

else {

44	print "ERROR: Could not download.\n";

45

}