Cheers: Wordle Wonders

Have you heard of Wordle? A friend of mine at work got me started with their site and it's really just one of the coolest things ever. It's basically this cool online application that takes in text input and then creates "word pictures" based on the frequency of words within the text input. It's a great way to visually identify word patterns, and it's also a really cool way to get a "snapshot" of an individual's writing style.

So of course I loaded in the text of all 900+ of my Amazon reviews and told it to get to work.

The easiest part of the exercise actually turned out to be the Wordle part - getting the text from my Amazon reviews was significantly harder. Fortunately, Husband's ARAT program actually already comes with a "File --> Export Review Text to Zip Archive" option, so I was able to get text files of my 900+ reviews in a relatively quick manner, but actually combining them all into a single text file for Wordle to analyze was a bit trickier. I ended up with the following batch script, but there's probably an easier way to combine multiple text files into one text file:

BatchCombine.bat script is below.

@ECHO OFF

FOR /F "delims==" %%a IN ('dir /b .\Documents\*.txt') DO (

type ".\Documents\%%a" >> mergefile.txt

type ".\return.txt" >> mergefile.txt

)

ECHO.

PAUSE.

@ECHO ON

The red "Documents" in the above script is just the name of the folder where I stored all my individual text files (unzipped from the ARAT export). The "return.txt" is a text file that simply contains a single carriage return - this was implemented so that the merged text files wouldn't run together at the beginning and ending of each file. The same setup should work just fine for you - if not, send me an email and we'll work through it.

(For the curious, the "delims==" statement allows the loop to handle text file inputs that have spaces in their names, rather than breaking off at the first instance of white space in the file name. Took me awhile to figure that one out - batch isn't my specialty, I'm afraid.)