Get your Wu-name in six lines of Python

I recently had a need to generate screen-names for a bunch of test users. I remembered the wonderful Wu-name generator and it was too tempting to pass up.

import urllib
from lxml.html import fromstring
def get_wu_name(first_name, last_name):
    """
    >>> get_wu_name("Jeff", "Elmore")
    'Ultra-Chronic Monstah'
    """
    w = urllib.urlopen("http://www.recordstore.com/wuname/wuname.pl",
                       urllib.urlencode({'fname':first_name, 'sname': last_name}))
    doc = fromstring(w.read())
    return [d for d in doc.iter('span') if d.get('class') == 'newname'][0].text

Okay, technically it’s more than six if you count the docstring and linewrap but still. Also, I felt like there should be a better way to do the last line, but this works well enough.

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3 Responses to “Get your Wu-name in six lines of Python”


  1. 1 Lazer ₫ February 21, 2011 at 6:35 pm

    You have been lazerdong’ed.

  2. 2 Tony March 25, 2014 at 7:56 pm

    You could do something like this for the last line:

    return doc.xpath(‘//span[@class=”newname”]/text()’)[0]


  1. 1 Don’t waste your iterators! « Cliff Dyer’s Blog Trackback on August 28, 2011 at 1:40 pm

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