Daleks Space Invasion of Planet Death

Royalty cheques to the usual address please!

Anyway, for my fellow geeks amongst you, here are the meat and potatoes of how I came to this great revelation:

For the task in hand, I used my favourite text-cruncher, Vim in its MacVim disguise. I started with a list of the series titles, snaffled from the BBC website.

The first task was to break up this list into individual words. Time for some cryptic Vim mastery:

:%s/\>/\r/g

Inserts a line-break after each word. The list now looks like this:

Now it’s time to clean up a bit:

:%s/\W//g

Will remove any non-word characters. The list now looks like this:

Actually, those both look the same when pasted into Tumblr, but in Vim, the previous version of the list was a lot more ragged. with lots of spaces before and after words.

Let’s get rid of the blank lines:

:v/\w/d

Now the list looks like this:

Now we’re getting somewhere. Next step is to uppercase all the words, so that the counting and sorting functions don’t treat upper and lower case versions of the same word as being different words:

:%s/.*/\U&/

This gives us the following:

Now, at last, we’re ready to start counting the individual words. First we need to sort them alphabetically:

:%sort

Giving us this:

After sorting the words alphabetically, we can now use the uniq command to count the individual occurrences of each word:

:%!uniq -c

At last we have a breakdown of the popularity of individual words:

Again, Tumblr is helpfully stripping whitespace from this list. In reality, I found that the uniq command re-introduced some spaces before the lines, so i used:

:%s/^\s\+

to get rid of those. Then finally I used

:%sort!

To sort the wordlist in reverse order, so the most popular words were at the top. The top of my actual real world list ended up like this:

All other words on the list had only one occurrence.

So there you have it. Doctor Who statistics gathering powered by Vim. Could I write a more geeky post if I tried!