PseudoName

Random Name (Pseudonym) Generator

PseudoName generates a random name from lists of name data in an Excel spreadsheet. Unlike most random name generators PseudoName will generate a random name using the characters used in the desired locale. For example to generate a random female Chinese name most name generators would produce a string such as Dongyi Li. However, this name in Chinese is actually 冬怡 李.(Actually, Dongyi is not a pseudonym. Dongyi is my friend and she was kind enough to produce the Chinese name list of male, female, and surnames, and also helped me with refactoring the code used in this tool.)

Since most of the world's software now supports (or should support) Unicode, and especially if our software supports different languages, and we want to fully test globalization of our software we should expand our testing beyond simple ASCII characters

PseudoName reads the first 3 columns in an Excel spreadsheet rather than rows of data. This means the list of female names, males names and surnames can each be of different length. Unfortunately, this approach is also a bit slow. (For example, the US Names.xlsx file has 300 male names, 500 female names, and 1000 surname and it takes approximately 4.5 seconds to generate a random name. The list of Chinese names includes 149 characters used in female names, 151 characters used in male names, and 406 characters used as surnames and it takes PseudoName approximately a second to generate a Chinese name.) Reducing the number of names in the Excel spreadsheet will reduce the time required to read in the columns of names.

Download PseudoName

NOTE: PseudoName is current only available as a dynamic link library for use in automated test cases. See Testing Mentor Library for information on how to use PseudoName in an automated test case. (If there are sufficient requests I will slap a GUI on the code for manual testing.)

Current Names Lists

Right click the links below to download the appropriate spreadsheets.

(Please send me more names lists.)