Gender PHP Extension

Synopsis
========

<?php
$gender = new Gender("compress.bzip2:///home/user/nam_dict.txt.bz2");

$name = "Milene";
$country = Gender::FRANCE;

$result = $gender->get($name, $country);

switch($result) {
    case Gender::IS_FEMALE:
    case Gender::IS_MOSTLY_FEMALE:
        printf("The name %s is female in %s\n", $name, $country);
    break;

    case Gender::IS_MALE:
    case Gender::IS_MOSTLY_MALE:
        printf("The name %s is male in %s\n", $name, $country);
    break;
    
    default:
        print "I'm not sure, what gender your name is\n";
    break;
}


Frequently Asked Questions
==========================

What is the Gender PHP extension?

Gender PHP extension is a port of the gender.c program originally written
by Joerg Michael. The main purpose is to find out the gender of firstnames.
The actually database contains >43000 firstnames from 54 countries.


Why is the data from the original program distributed with PHP extension?

The original author Joerg Michael gave his permission to redistribute the
first names lexicon file (which originally released under GNU Free 
Documentation License) together with the PHP port of the gender program 
(which is originally released under LGPL).


Which character encoding has the extensions data?

The encoding is iso-8859-1.


Is there any support for non latin alphabets?

No, but any transliterated data is supported.


The name <whatever> is not found.

For non ascii and transliterated names - please check the transliteration 
method and/or character encoding of the string you are passing. If a name
is indeed not found, feel free to extend the data and advise extension's
authors.


Is there any database support for the extensions data?

Not yet, but it's planed in future versions.


How much does the firstnames lexicon file take?

About 200Kb bzipped and about 4Mb uncompressed.
