I am currently working on a project for which I need to identify WordPress blogs as fast as possible, given a list of URLs. I decided to write a review on this topic since I found relevant but sparse hints on how to do it.

First of all, let’s say that guessing if a website uses WordPress by analysing HTML code is straightforward if nothing was been done to hide it, which is almost always the case. As WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, downloading every page and performing a check afterward is an option …

I recently had to deal with a series of files with different encodings in the same corpus, and I would like to share the solution I found in order to try to convert automatically all the files in a directory to the same encoding (here UTF-8).

file -i

I first tried to write a script in order to detect and correct the encoding, but it was everything but easy, so I decided to use UNIX software instead, assuming these tools would be adequate and robust enough.

I was not disappointed, as file for example gives relevant information when used …

As I recently tried several modeling techniques in R, I would like to share some of these, with a focus on linear regression.

Disclaimer: the code lines below work, but I would not suggest that they are the most efficient way to deal with this kind of data (as a matter of fact, all of them score slightly below 80% accuracy on the Kaggle datasets). Moreover, there are not always the most efficient way to implement a given model.

I see it as a way to quickly test several frameworks without going into details.

The column names used in the …

Let’s pretend you recently installed R (a software to do statistical computing), you have a text collection you would like to analyze or classify and some time to lose. Here are a few quick commands that could get you a little further. I also write this kind of cheat sheet in order to remember a set of useful tricks and packages I recently gathered and from which I thought they could help others too.

Letter frequencies

In this example I will use a series of characteristics (or features) extracted from a text collection, more precisely the frequency of each …

This morning I was looking for a way to delete the dispensable aux, bbl, blg, log, out and toc files that a pdflatex compilation generates. I wanted it to go through directories so that it would eventually find old files and delete them too. I also wanted to do it from the command-line interface and to integrate it within a bash script.

As I didn’t find this bash snippet as such, i.e. adapted to the LaTeX-generated files, I post it here:

find . -regex ".*\(aux\|bbl\|blg\|log\|nav\|out\|snm\|toc\)$" -exec rm -i {} \;

This works on Unix …

Given a dictionary, say one of the frequent words lists of the University of Leipzig, given a series of words: How can you check which ones belong to the list ?

Another option would be to use the operator available since Perl 5.10: :::perl if ($word ~~ @list) {…} But this gets very slow if the size of the list increases. I wrote a naive implementation of the binary search algorithm in Perl that I would like to share. It is not that fast though. Basic but it works.

First of all the wordlist gets read:

my $dict = 'leipzig10000';
open (DICTIONARY, $dict …

I have been working with the part-of-speech tagger developed at the IMS Stuttgart TreeTagger since my master thesis. It performs well on german texts as one could easily suppose, since it was one of its primary purposes. One major problem is that it’s poorly documented, so I would like to share the way that I found to pass things to TreeTagger through a pipe.

The first thing is that TreeTagger doesn’t take Unicode strings, as it dates back to the nineties. So you have to convert whatever you pass to ISO-8859-1, which the iconv software with the …