5 releases

0.1.4 Apr 25, 2023
0.1.3 Feb 28, 2021
0.1.2 Feb 28, 2021
0.1.1 Feb 23, 2021
0.1.0 Feb 23, 2021

#976 in Encoding

Custom license

70KB
1.5K SLoC

namegen

This library offers high performance random name generation with sub-microsecond full names on even older computers. My use case for this is a website, but I've left this general enough to even fit into other procedural generation systems.

Features

  • serde support with feature flag serde
  • wasm_bindgen supported. The github repo has a project for building it.

Example

Formats

The name formats has a special syntax. They're what describes how to build a full name from the parts. The tokens are in curly braces, and they mean the following.

  • {first_name}: Generate part with name first_name.
  • {=stuff}: Returns the word "stuff".
  • {first_name|=Unnamed}: A | indicates a random pick between the items. Here it will either generate the first_name part or just the word Unnamed.
  • {:full_name}: The : prefix denotes a format. It can only refer to formats that were added before it, both due to optimization and to avoid an infinite recursion.

Here are a few examples.

  • {first_name} {last_name}: The referred name parts with a space between.
  • {first}'{clan} {=vas|=nar} {ship}: The third {...} is either one of these two.
  • {:full_name|:first_name}, the {title}: The first {...} chooses between these two formats.

Generators

markov

Generate names using a second-order markov chain. This is not a naive implementation, however, and some constraints has been made to create more faithful names:

  • Beginnings, middles and ends are not treated as the same type of node, and the name's length is picked at the start of generation.
  • A token-frequency restriction can be put on it to prevent tokens occuring more in generated names than any of the samples.

cfgrammar

Generate names using a context-free grammar, with some constraints to keep symbol frequencies in check and to deal with those damn ys.

  • The depth is fixed, so result rules breaks up into token rules that then gets you the token.

wordlist

A simple word list generator, for the cases where output should be one of the samples. The samples can be weighted.

Dependencies

~1.4–2.4MB
~43K SLoC