Function Improvement

[Santino]

Hey

I am looking to improve my working function below;

The objective is to get back a list of countries from the free api.
The argument parsed is the number of countries the user wants back , the default is ALL the countries .

Two ways i want to improve is ;

a)i want the len(z) , the maximum value to be defined within the loop instead of explicitly defining it as 250
this would be in case countries are added
b) I want an object list 'country_list' , which is appended to in this code, to be created by this function , and not only just as output displayed when running the function

--------start of function -----------------------

def list_of_countries(number_to_return=250):

    allurl='https://restcountries.eu/rest/v2/all'

    uh=urllib.request.urlopen(allurl)
    data = uh.read().decode()
    z=json.loads(data)
    
    lim=number_to_return 
    country_list=list()
    
    i=0
    while i < lim :
        y=z[i]
        country_list.append(y['name'])
        i+=1 
        
    return  country_list

-------------------------end of function---------------------


test case 1 : list_of_countries(4)
test case 2 : list_of_countries() #without explicitly using 250 in default
test case 3 : print(country_list)