What is Kotlin Name Generator?

Kotlin Name Generator (or KNG for short) aims to provide flexible name generators. It is a library written in Kotlin and mainly focused on Kotlin usage. This means you might be able to use it from Java but there are no promises that you will have fun.

The idea for this library arose when I needed to generate names for military elements for a game (pltcmd, by the way). These elements are highly hierarchical. For example there might be "Alpha" with its subordinates "Alpha-1", "Alpha-2" and "Alpha-3". Other elements might need to get "cool names" like "Black Wolves" or "Phantom Six".

This library offers a simple API to create generators for such names. Let's have a look:

What it contains and how to use

The API

You start off with a WordList. This is a simple list of Strings that should not be empty and preferably contain unique values. Except you want some names to have a higher probability to show up or simply repeat specific values.

A NameGenerator takes a word list and picks words from it to create Names. That's basically it, but name generators can be configured in many ways. For example, they can be autoResetting, meaning they produce an endless (repeating) stream of names. They can pick words randomly or in order. Or they can combine multiple other generators to have sequences like "Pink flamingos", "Pink pigs", "Blue flamingos", "Blue pigs".

A Name is basically a wrapped String. In most cases you might need to just get that string, which is possible via its asString() method. But you can even skip the Name object by getting nextAsString() from a NameGenerator instead of next().

Usage

See the examples module for different ways of usage.

For word lists and name generators there are builder methods that provide an API to configure them.

To create a WordList use wordListOf() or simply turn a List<String> into a WordList with the extension function asWordList().

A NameGenerator is created using the function nameGenerator(). It takes a WordList and an optional block to configure the resulting generator:

val endlessGenerator = nameGenerator(words) {
        autoReset = true
    }