Tukukkk

Tired of thinking up random names when following tutorials involving people? So was I.

The code below is the first project I've written in Python. Put simply, it grabs a list of forenames and last-names from an online database, saves them into a dictionary, then writes it to a JSON file. After that, the rest of the code reads the JSON file, chooses a first and last name based on any regex strings passed into the function, then returns the first and last name as a single string, separated by a space.

I've noticed however, this baby is sloooooow. I'm talking 150 - 200ms to generate a name. That's 20 seconds to generate a list of 100 names. I know there's huge room for improvement here, but I'm not well versed enough in the standard libraries yet.

Here it is:

from codecs import decode

from json import dump, loads

from pathlib import Path

from random import randrange

from re import compile, findall, IGNORECASE

from timeit import default_timer as timer

from urllib import request





DB_FORE = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smashew/NameDatabases/master/NamesDatabases/first%20names/us.txt'

DB_LAST = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smashew/NameDatabases/master/NamesDatabases/surnames/us.txt'





def write_names(dest, url_forename = DB_FORE, url_surname = DB_LAST):

    """

    Writes the names from the database to the given destination.

    :param dest: the name of the destination file. Blank if you want the string returned

    :param url_forename: url containing plain text first names, entries separated by rn

    :param url_surname: url containing plain text last names, entries separated by n

    """

    names = {

        # Last values tend to be buggy, so get rid of them

        'forenames': _get_names(url_forename).split("rn")[:-1],

        'surnames': _get_names(url_surname).split("n")[:-1],

    }



    with open(dest, 'w') as json_file:

        dump(names, json_file, indent = 4, separators = (',', ': '))





def random_name(fmatches = '', smatches = ''):

    """

    Gets a random name in the form "Forename Lastname".

    :param fmatches: a regex string to try to match to a forename

    :param smatches: a regex string to try to match to a surname

    :return: a random name based on the regex inputs, or None if no names were found

    """

    file_name = 'names.json'

    names_file = Path(file_name)

    if not Path(names_file).is_file():

        print(f'{file_name} not found, writing from default database')

        write_names(file_name)

        print('Done!')



    with names_file.open('r') as json_file:

        names = loads(json_file.read())

        first = _choose_name(fmatches, names['forenames'])

        last = _choose_name(smatches, names['surnames'])



        if first is None or last is None:

            return None

        else:

            return first + " " + last





def _get_names(url):

    with request.urlopen(url) as site:

        return str(decode(site.read(), 'utf-8'))





def _choose_name(expr, data):

    if expr is None:

        return data[randrange(0, len(data))]

    else:

        return _random_match(compile(expr, flags = IGNORECASE), data)





def _match_names(expr, data):

    return [name for name in data if findall(expr, name)]





def _random_match(expr, data):

    matches = _match_names(expr, data)

    return matches[randrange(0, len(matches))] if len(matches) > 0 else None





if __name__ == '__main__':

    start = timer()

    print(random_name('rose', 'an'))

    end = timer()

    print(end - start, 'n')



    start = timer()

    print(random_name(fmatches = '^jo'))

    end = timer()

    print(end - start, 'n')



    start = timer()

    print(random_name(smatches = 'en$'))

    end = timer()

    print(end - start, 'n')



    start = timer()

    print(random_name(fmatches = 'grf'))

    end = timer()

    print(end - start, 'n')



    start = timer()

    print([random_name() for _ in range(10)])

    end = timer()

    print(end - start, 'n')

The JSON file (named 'names.json') is in the following format:

{

    "forenames": [

        "Aaron",

        "Abbey",

        "Abdul",

        ...

    ],

    "surnames": [

        "Aaberg",

        "Aaby",

        "Aadland",

        ...

    ]

}

For reference, there's about 5,000 forenames, and 90,000 surnames... yeah, I'm thinking that has something to do with how slow it is (go figure). Obviously I could speed up the execution significantly by removing a lot of uncommon names, but I want to know if there is any way I can improve the current implementation with the current list of names.

The name generator supports entering regex strings, but I haven't seen any notable performance difference between generating a name with or without regex.

Here's a sample output from running the module:

Roseanna Sodeman

0.1488200619749599 



Joette Knorr

0.21161438351850587 



Birdie Tohen

0.15252753028006855 



None

0.21214806850333456 



['Mohammed Koelzer', 'Luvenia Kovalcin', 'Danica Lehnen', 'Chad Mannan', 

'Naomi Kilborne', 'Cami Lydecker', 'Amie Dearson', 'Seema Reiche', 'Ai 

Bruhn', 'Laureen Gitthens']

2.1672272217311948

Because I'm a beginner, I would appreciate reviews on both improving the performance of the code, and also my code style (i.e. any standard libraries I could be utilising, any shortcuts such as List Comprehension that I'm missing).