Make random names in Python

make_random_names.md

The following code is written for Python3. Complete random name function in next file.

The first bit of code grabs a disctionary listing from the web and returns a list of all the entries in that dictionary.
(see https://stackoverflow.com/a/49524775/4038393)

import urllib.request

word_url = "http://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/dict/words?view=co&content-type=text/plain"
response = urllib.request.urlopen(word_url)
long_txt = response.read().decode()
words = long_txt.splitlines()

Output list of words:

>>> words
['a', 'AAA', 'AAAS', 'aardvark', 'Aarhus', 'Aaron', 'ABA', 'Ababa',
 'aback', 'abacus', 'abalone', 'abandon', 'abase', 'abash', 'abate',
 'abbas', 'abbe', 'abbey', 'abbot', 'Abbott', 'abbreviate', ... ]

Then we want to generate a list of 1) only upper case words, 2) only "name like" words (i.e., not abbreviations), and 3) a sort-of-realistic-but-fun sounding random name from the list:

import random
upper_words = [word for word in words if word[0].isupper()]
name_words  = [word for word in upper_words if not word.isupper()]
rand_name   = ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0, len(name_words)-1)] for i in range(2)])

And some random names:

>>> for n in range(10):
        ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0,len(name_words)-1)] for i in range(2)])

    'Semiramis Sicilian'
    'Julius Genevieve'
    'Rwanda Cohn'
    'Quito Sutherland'
    'Eocene Wheller'
    'Olav Jove'
    'Weldon Pappas'
    'Vienna Leyden'
    'Io Dave'
    'Schwartz Stromberg'

rand_names.py

import urllib.request
import random

word_url = "http://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/dict/words?view=co&content-type=text/plain"
response = urllib.request.urlopen(word_url)
long_txt = response.read().decode()
words = long_txt.splitlines()

upper_words = [word for word in words if word[0].isupper()]
name_words  = [word for word in upper_words if not word.isupper()]
one_name = ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0, len(name_words)-1)] for i in range(2)])


def rand_name():
   name = ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0, len(name_words)-1)] for i in range(2)])
   return name


for n in range(10):
    name = rand_name()
    print(name)

Hi! I stumbled upon this snippet and tried it out. I tried it for longer ranges, like 50k and I started getting index out-of bounds errors.

This line
name = ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0, len(name_words))] for i in range(2)])

gets an index out of bounds error if the random integer turns out to be len(name_words). This very rarely happens for short ranges, but with long ranges this tends to happen quite frequently. If you change it to:

name = ' '.join([name_words[random.randint(0, len(name_words)-1)] for i in range(2)])

Then that fixes it.

Sorry for prying about in your code, just thought I would drop a line!

Regards,

Alex