I like @celenius' answer; however, another option would be to export the the World Borders Dataset to CSV using ogr2ogr. I just downloaded your preferred dataset and ran this command with ogr2ogr --note that your script should be a single string without any line breaks. I find them easiest to write in notepad with wordwrap turned on, then I copy them into my ogr2ogr terminal:
ogr2ogr -f "CSV" "E:\4_GIS\01_tutorials\worldborders\World_wkt"
"E:\4_GIS\01_tutorials\worldborders\TM_WORLD_BORDERS-0.3.shp" -lco
"GEOMETRY=AS_WKT" -lco "LINEFORMAT=CRLF" -lco "SEPARATOR=SEMICOLON"
(CAVEAT: Copying/pasting my ogr script from the web and into your terminal won't work because the website will introduce linebreaks and ASCII character substitutions for the double-quotes. OGR will have trouble reading the script as a result. For this reason I recommend you type your adjusted script into notepad first, or directly into the terminal.)
OGR will create the World_wkt
directory before it performs the file format translation, so don't make that directory before running your script or you'll get an error.
Here's a snippet of the results I got:
WKT;FIPS;ISO2;ISO3;UN;NAME;AREA;POP2005;REGION;SUBREGION;LON;LAT
"MULTIPOLYGON (((-61.686668 17.024441000000138,-61.73806 16.98971
"POLYGON ((2.96361 36.802216,2.981389 36.806938,3.001111 36.80971
"MULTIPOLYGON (((45.083321 39.768044000000145,45.266388 39.611107
"POLYGON ((19.436214 41.021065,19.450554 41.059998,19.513611 41.2
"MULTIPOLYGON (((45.573051000000135 40.632488,45.528881 40.606098
"MULTIPOLYGON (((11.750832 -16.75528,11.775 -16.804726,11.77 -16.
"MULTIPOLYGON (((-170.542511 -14.2975,-170.546112 -14.29861,-170.
That's a snippet of Well Known Text (WKT). Very human-readable, but those strings continue to the right for a long, long way, so I didn't want to copy-in the complete records. :)
If you just want to download the CSV dataset I created, I posted it here, but I would encourage you to try this technique for yourself. If you're interested and want more info, I wrote a closely-themed blog post a few weeks ago, which you're welcome to snipe for the more salient details.