Is there any plan to increase the number of names? I often exceed the number of names (when sampling without replacement) and it would be great to know if there are plans to add more, or are you open to accepting contributions (for example for ethnicities currently not included)?

Hello i really like this package, it automated a lot of my work. Now it would be perfect if i could get to choose random names that start with a specific letter in a argument inside the function for example:

randomNames(n=5, gender=1, ethnicity = 4, which.names="first", initial.letter="M")
# [1] "Maria" "Magdalena" "Margarita" "Margot" "Milagros"

Thank you and looking forward for an answer. Greetings from Peru

When calling randomNames(gender = g) on a gender vector that contains NAs, the generated names do no longer represent gender correctly:

# Define gender vector
> (g <- rep(0:1, each = 3))
[1] 0 0 0 1 1 1

# Gender is correctly represented
> randomNames::randomNames(gender = g, which.names = "first")
[1] "Samuel"   "Carlos"   "Theodore" "Emlynn"   "Briana"   "Deborah" 

# Include NA in gender vector
> g[3] <- NA
> randomNames::randomNames(gender = g, which.names = "first")
[1] "Maleeha" "Sean"    "Sad"     "Sang"    "Labeeba" "Carter" 

# First gender is 0 (male)
> g[1]
[1] 0

# "Maleeha" is not among any mal first names list
> fn_male <- grep("^first.*g0$", names(randomNames::randomNamesData))
> sapply(fn_male, function(i)  "Maleeha" %in% names(randomNames::randomNamesData[[
+     names(randomNames::randomNamesData)[i]
+     ]])
+ )
[1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE

First and foremost, just to say that I really like the {randomNames} R package. It has been really useful for a package we're developing in the Epiverse-TRACE intiative: {simulist}.

Within that package we use a testing setup option that automatically checks whether we are using partial argument matching (i.e. only matching some of the argument name within a function which is then matched to the full argument name by R). This check also picks up if dependencies used within the package are using partial argument matching, and it has detected some in {randomNames}.

Specifically, the rep() function, where currently, length is being used and partially matched to length.out. It would be great if this could be updated to avoid partial matching. I've added some links at the bottom of this issue to why using partial matching can make code brittle.

I'm happy to make a PR from a fork of the package to make the recommended changes.

Links:

• https://design.tidyverse.org/call-data-details.html#whats-the-pattern
• https://bookdown.org/rdpeng/rprogdatascience/functions.html

Thank you for your collaboration getting #82 merged and in responding to issues I've raised. Would it be possible make a new version release and submit this new version to CRAN?

This would assist getting a package I am working on onto CRAN (see epiverse-trace/simulist#1).

I've completed the reverse dependency check and there were no errors and everything passed. I can paste the output logs of this revdep_check() on this issue if you would like.

I was unable to run the R CMD check due to the inst/doc directory.

Please let me know if you would be open to the idea of a new release and a submission of this new release to CRAN, I am happy to assist in any way possible.

When running the command
randomNames(1, which.names = "first", gender = 1)
some names are returned which have leading whitespaces. E.g. " Huda" and " Muzna".

Even though this can be fixed easily with trimws it is unexpected and maybe problematic to some people if these names are also returned without whitespace sometimes.

Hi! I am successfully using this great package in data frames with one record per person. I would like to use it when I have multiple records.
Here's a quick example:

Is there a method to assign the same anonymized name to a person with the same unique identifier such as ID?

Hi - this is a neat package for a specific purpose. One possible nice feature - could you set parameters birth_year_start = 1960 (default) and birth_year_end = 2000 (default), The user could then change these parameters to get firstnames appropriate for people born between 1880-1890, or 2000-2010. Ideally this would use the weighted frequency of each firstname by gender for the included range of birth years.

Hi, this is very useful. Could you let me know what was the source dataset(s) used to create the name distributions?

regards
Lucas

... to avoid duplicates, sometimes people might want to have unique names.

Installing the package and importing into the library statements for randomNames package is fine, but during the import statement library(randomNames) there will always be an error message populating:
randomNames 1.4-0.0 (3-7-2019). For help: >help("randomNames") or visit https://centerforassessment.github.io/randomNames

It seems that when the number of names is exhausted when using randomNames() (with sample.with.replacement = FALSE) it gives an uninformative error message about sampling. It would be great if the {randomNames} package could provide the user with an custom informative error message when the requested number of names is too large. This error message can also suggest turning sample.with.replacement to TRUE to help.

Here is a reprex to show an example

library(randomNames)
set.seed(1)
gender <- rep(c("M", "F"), 2525)
names <- randomNames::randomNames(
    which.names = "both",
    name.sep = " ",
    name.order = "first.last",
    gender = gender,
    sample.with.replacement = FALSE
)
str(names)
#>  chr [1:5050] "Sebastian Clayton" "Melisa White" "Eli Jackson" "Malisse Ha" ...

gender <- rep(c("M", "F"), 3000)
names <- randomNames::randomNames(
    which.names = "both",
    name.sep = " ",
    name.order = "first.last",
    gender = gender,
    sample.with.replacement = FALSE
)
#> Error in sample.int(length(x), size, replace, prob): cannot take a sample larger than the population when 'replace = FALSE'

^{Created on 2024-01-18 with reprex v2.0.2}

I want to generate many (9000) unique names to replace human unfriendly uuid-numbers. I wanted to extend the random name generator to enable infinite unique names by simply adding an integer when the maximum number of random names is reached.

In writing the function, I realised that I cant find a hard upper limit of number of names I can generate without replacement: I get an error at different ns.

For example below, the function returns an error on the first run, but is successful on the second, third and fourth try.

Can you elaborate on this?

library(randomNames)
#> Warning: Paket 'randomNames' wurde unter R Version 3.6.3 erstellt

set.seed(1)
one <- randomNames(5000, sample.with.replacement = FALSE)
#> Error in sample.int(length(x), size, replace, prob): kann keine Stichprobe größer als die Grundgesamtheit nehmen
#>  wenn 'replace = FALSE'
two <- randomNames(5000, sample.with.replacement = FALSE)
thr <- randomNames(5000, sample.with.replacement = FALSE)
fou <- randomNames(5000, sample.with.replacement = FALSE)

^{Created on 2020-03-18 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

The documentation states that the argument ofrandomNames(n) indicates "how many names to produce". In fact, the method always returns at least one name, which is contrary to the stated documentation. This affects correctness of the following examples

names <- append(names, randomNames::randomNames(num - length(names)))

test_that("test number of generated names", {
  expect_equal(10, length(randomNames(10)))
  expect_equal(1,  length(randomNames(1)))
  expect_equal(0,  length(randomNames(0)))
})

As of randomNames 0.1-0.0, the documentation says

       n: OPTIONAL. Integer indicating how many name to produce. Best
          to use when no gender or ethnicity data is provided and one
          simple wants ‘n’ random first and/or last names.

Neat package.

One minor thing, running this will result in a different person for the second row of the dataframe. The seed is only respected for the first run.

set.seed(1842)
randomNames(2, which.names = "both", return.complete.data = T)

The workaround:
set.seed(1842)
df1 <- bind_rows(randomNames(1, gender = T, ethnicity = T, which.names = "both", return.complete.data = T),
randomNames(1, gender = T, ethnicity = T, which.names = "both", return.complete.data = T),
randomNames(1, gender = T, ethnicity = T, which.names = "both", return.complete.data = T))

Any thoughts on allowing us to set the seed so we can always reproduce the same set of names?

I have a possibly annoying feature request: Would it be possible to make sample.with.replacement = FALSE work across ethnicities/ genders?

I wanted a list of randomly generated, unique names, but had to use a work around with unique() to get it to work.

library(randomNames)                                          
set.seed(7)                                                   
 
# expected unique names, but some are duplicated                                                             
random_names <- randomNames(100, which.names = 'first',       
sample.with.replacement = FALSE)                              
any(duplicated(random_names))                                 
#> [1] TRUE
                                                              
# by contrast, it works for a single ethnicity/ gender        
unique_random_names <- randomNames(100, which.names = 'first',
sample.with.replacement = FALSE, ethnicity = 1, gender = 1)   
any(duplicated(unique_random_names))                          
#> [1] FALSE

Sorry I couldn't figure this out from the documentation. Are the first and surnames conditionally independent (after accounting for ethnicity) or are they associated as per the original data?