Where do we find the data? There are many Gov. sites as well as private sites that have their data for download.

I have listed many that I have found here: BigData - Resources and Links For this exercise, we will use data from the Social Security Administration (SSA.Gov). I have provided the names for the years 1946 through 2002 in the Files section below ("yob1946.txt" to "yob2002.txt" where "yob" stands for "year of birth") . If you want other years than those two, download them yourself from here. 

note: Those are not absolutely all the names for those years, just the ones for 5 or more people. (i.e. If only you and 3 other people have the same name, it was not included). It still is a lot of names (almost 4 million names)

    a. open up LiveCode and create a new mainstack, size it to be the full height of the screen

        Click on "Object" on the EditBar, select "Stack Inspector", name it "Names"

    b. save the Stack

        Click on "File" on the Editbar", select "Save As", Save it as "Names.livecode" on your computer

    a. add a text entry field, size it to the card, name it "names" and check the Vertical Scrollbar check box

    a. add a button, call it "Load File". We will program it to allow us to select different files from our computer.

    

    add this script to it:

on mouseUp

   answer file "Select a Text file"                        // open up a file-selection dialog

   if it is empty then exit mouseUp                    // if user clicks "Cancel", do nothing

   put it into x                                                 // save the name of the file they selected

   put url ("file:" & x) into field "names"            // load the file into out text field

end mouseUp

    a. Download one of the data files below for the year in which you were born - e.g. "yob1999.txt"

    b. go into "Run" mode, click on the button and load that file into your program

It should look like this:

                              

You can see three fields - this is called a CSV format file. The letters stand for Comma Separated Values. Every field/item/value is separated with a comma. They are - the name, the gender and the number of people with that name. 

Notice that the names are in no particular order

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We can open the "Message Box" on the EditBar and try some commands.

    a. Find the name Sam by typing:   Find "Sam" in field "names"

       

We get this:(The name "Samantha" has a box around the letters "Sam"

                               

 

That helps but it would be nice if all the names were in order.

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  Let's put them in alphabetical order by typing: Sort field "names" in the MessageBox

                         

         That looks better, now let's so the find again: Find "Sam" in field "names"

                         

That looks good, because we now have all the names beginning with "Sam" together.

looking at the data, for this year there were

    15 Females named Sam

    476 Males named Sam

You can experiment with other commands in the Message Box for now but we will want to put those commands in our program to run automatically

Lets add the sort command to our "Load Files" button:

on mouseUp

   answer file "Select a Txt file"                        // open up a file-selection dialog

   if it is empty then exit mouseUp                   // if user clicks "Cancel", do nothing

   put it into x                                                   // save the name of the file they selected

   put url ("file:" & x) into field "names"           // load the file into out text field

   sort field "names"

end mouseUp

Now, when we load a new year, it will be sorted for us.

Now, Add another text field - "name2find" and a button "Find Name"

On the button put the code to get the name the user types into that field and look for that name in then list of names

    e.g. 

on mouseUp

        put field "name2find" into x

                   find x in field "names"

            end mouseUp

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    Extra:

    You can load any file into a field. For fun, load any other text file. You can see its contents inside the field.

    Try a HTML page, you can see all the HTML tags and text.

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New Code for "Load Files" button

on mouseUp

   answer file "Select a Txt file"

   if it is empty then 

      exit mouseUp

   end if

   put it into x

    put url ("file:" & x) into y

   sort y

   put empty into field "girls"

   put empty into field "boys"

   repeat for each line l in y

      if item 2 of l = "M" then

         put l  & return after b1

      else

         put l & return after g1

      end if

   end repeat

   sort lines of b1 descending numeric by item 3 of each 

   sort lines of g1 descending numeric by item 3 of each

   put b1 into field "boys"

   put g1 into field "girls"

   

end mouseUp

on mouseUp

   put field "myname" into x

   find x in field "boys"

   

   set itemDelimiter to space

   put item 2 of  foundline() into field "num"

end mouseUp