Today, I was messing around with data, trying to figure out a simple way to tell the difference between news articles and entertainment pieces. It’s something I’ve been curious about, and I thought, “Why not give it a shot myself?”
Starting Simple
First, I grabbed a bunch of articles online. I made sure to get a good mix – some serious news reports and some light-hearted entertainment stories. I just copied and pasted them into a text file. Nothing fancy.
Cleaning Up the Mess
Next, I opened up the text file and started cleaning things up. You know, removing all the extra junk like HTML tags and weird characters. I basically wanted just the plain text of each article.
Counting Words
Then came the fun part. I wrote a really basic script – it wasn’t anything complicated, just a few lines of code – to count the words in each article. I figured that news articles might use different words than entertainment ones. So, I made a list of words I thought were common in news, like “government,” “economy,” and “official.” And another list for entertainment, with words like “celebrity,” “movie,” and “fun.”
Checking the Results
- I ran my script and it counted how many times these “news” and “entertainment” words showed up in each article.
- If an article had more “news” words, I labeled it as “news.” If it had more “entertainment” words, I called it “entertainment.”
- It will show how many news-related words and entertainment-related words in each sentence.
Was it Perfect? Nope.
Of course, it wasn’t perfect. Some articles were tricky, and my simple word lists weren’t always enough. But it was a start! It gave me a basic way to categorize articles, and it was cool to see how the word counts could actually hint at the type of content. For some setences, it’s hard to tell if it’s news or entertainment, just by counting the words.
What’s Next?
This was just a quick and dirty experiment. I know there are much better ways to do this, but it was fun to try it out myself. Maybe next time, I’ll try something a bit more advanced, But for now, I’m happy with my simple little word-counting method. It’s a good reminder that you can often learn a lot just by trying things out, even if it’s not perfect.
