Author: Alex Bowe
Email:  bowe[dot]alexander[at]gmail[dot]com
Web:    http://www.alexbowe.com

Background:
I'm doing a project for a subject at RMIT which needs to manage thousands of patient records for a hospital. We haven't been given any sample data though, so I wanted to write a generator (so we can test it with small or large data sets whenever needed).

I started with the name generator, which selected a random male/female/last name from a file. I then realised an address generator would behave similarly (street, city, country lists), so I decided to make a Generator base class.

Usage:
A Generator can be created and used like so (passing it a dictionary of desired function names as keys and the files they should access as their dictionary entry):

>>>from Generator import Generator
>>>gen = Generator({ 'key' : 'path/to/file', 'key2' : 'path/to/otherfile' })
>>>gen.key()  # returns a random line from path/to/file
>>>gen.key2() # returns a random line from path/to/otherfile

A NameGenerator can be created and used like so:

>>>from NameGenerator import NameGenerator
>>>ng = NameGenerator()
>>>ng.lastname()   # returns a random lastname
'DEWALD'
>>>ng.femalename() # returns a random female name
'LILIA'
>>>ng.malename()   # returns a random male name
'ARTHUR'

Notes:
The name lists were taken from http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/1990surnames/names_files.html, which actually provides percentages for each name too, if you wanted to make the name distribution more realistic...