Gender Detector

GenderDetector is a PHP package that detects the gender of a person based on first name. It uses the data file from the project 'gender.c' by Jörg Michael (details).

Installation

Install it with Composer

composer require tuqqu/gender-detector

Usage

Its usage is simple, for any given name it will give you one of the following genders (strings):

male
mostly_male
unisex
mostly_female
female

For an unknown name it will return null. All the gender values are available as constants of the GenderDetector\Gender class for the convenience.

<?php 

$genderDetector = new GenderDetector\GenderDetector();

print $genderDetector->detect('Thomas');
// male

print $genderDetector->detect('Avery');
// unisex

I18N is fully supported

<?php

print $genderDetector->detect('Želmíra');
// female

print $genderDetector->detect('Geirþrúður');
// female

You may specify a country or region.

<?php

print $genderDetector->detect('Robin');
// mostly_male

print $genderDetector->detect('Robin', GenderDetector\Country::USA);
// mostly_female

print $genderDetector->detect('Robin', GenderDetector\Country::FRANCE);
// male

print $genderDetector->detect('Robin', GenderDetector\Country::IRELAND);
// unisex

All the countries are available as constants of the GenderDetector\Country class.

For more details see country list.

You may want to override the unknown name value. If it is the case, you need to set a new value with setUnknownGender(string $unknown) method.

<?php

$genderDetector = new GenderDetector\GenderDetector();

print $genderDetector->detect('Doe');
// (null)

$genderDetector->setUnknownGender(GenderDetector\Gender::UNISEX);

print $genderDetector->detect('Doe');
// unisex

If you happen to have an alternative data file, you might pass it to the GenderDetector constructor's first argument. Additionally you may add new dictionary files with addDictionaryFile(string $path) method.

<?php

$genderDetector = new GenderDetector\GenderDetector('custom_file_path/dict.txt');
$genderDetector->addDictionaryFile('custom_file_path/another_dict.txt');

Note that each GenderDetector instantiation triggers file parsing, so you might want to avoid reading the same file twice.

Licenses

The GenderDetector is licensed under the MIT License.

The data file data/nam_dict.txt is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.