Loading the data seems to take 5-10s on my machine. It'd be great if we could speed this up by doing the data loading in parallel.

I'm a big fan the code you've done to make this great dataset usable. I've had to request a major international company install "sexmachine", so that's how useful it has been *. In using the code, I've come up with some suggestions for how to improve. I'm happy to implement some if you think they are useful.

• Country naming support: Although defined in detector.py,

  COUNTRIES = u"""great_britain ireland usa italy ... other_countries""".split()

Names can be additionally mapped by ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 codes. For example,

d.get_gender(u"Andrea", 'IT')

would return the same as

d.get_gender(u"Andrea", 'italy')

• Distinguish "not found" and "androgynous": Names that are not found should be distinguished from names that are androgynous. For example,

  print d.get_gender(u"Pauley")
  print d.get_gender(u"dssad12jkasdl")

Should print "andy", "unknown" instead of twice printing "andy".

• Include some data: Return country probability for a name. For example:

  print d.get_gender(u"Andrea")

would return something like:

italy, male, 99%
usa, mostly_female, 85%
global, female, 95%

* The Ruby package was renamed gender_detector based on the blog post here.

hi! I would like to to contribute data to nam_dict.txt. Specifically, Indian male, female names (as in Asia/India). I am native to South of India. Do I just send in a PR to the file or is there something I am missing that I should bear in mind before I contribute data? Thanks

I've the next problem:

davidam@debian:~/git/python-examples$ pip install sexmachine
Requirement already satisfied: sexmachine in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages

davidam@debian:~/git/python-examples$ python sexmachine.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "sexmachine.py", line 1, in
import sexmachine.detector as gender
File "/home/davidam/git/python-examples/sexmachine.py", line 1, in
import sexmachine.detector as gender
ImportError: No module named detector

The source code is:

$ cat sexmachine.py
import sexmachine.detector as gender
d = gender.Detector()
if (d.get_gender(u"Bob") == 'male'):
print("Python")
elif (d.get_gender(u"Sally") == 'female'):
print("Shell")
else:
print("PHP")

Regards.

Had to change a few lines to make it work in Python3:

mapping.py
Comment out lines 75 and 76:

#u = u.replace(pattern.decode("utf-8"), unichr(code))
#u = u.replace(pattern, unichr(code))

And add a line 76:
pass

detector.py
Change line 80:
best = list(self.names[name].keys())[0]

Change line 98:
return (len(list(country_values)),