Big Bang Theory – Poppy Ramblings

So I wanted to look up a Big Bang Theory episode yesterday and I noticed that Google found quite a number of pages referencing it. As a result, I got curious how many results each of the episodes would return. A few lines of Perl code later, here is the result.

Big Bang Episodes relative popularity based on Google results

It lists the number of results returned for each episode as a measure of relative popularity. Interesting… By the way, I had to cut out the pilot episode because it turns out that the NSTA pilot’s certification requires you to know about the Big Bang Theory… Huh, who knew!? ;]

Here is the Perl code for the previous Big Bang Theory chart. In case you’re interested… ;]

Edited 2011-11-12 to improve the Perl code, removed dependency on having video files to pull titles from and pull from the Wikipedia Big Bang Episodes list article instead.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP;
use Data::Dumper;
use File::Find;
use GD::Graph::bars;
use GD::Graph::colour qw(:colours :lists :files :convert);
use List::Util qw /max/;

my $googleAPIkey = 'INSERT-YOUR-KEY-HERE';
my $googurl = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=";
my %results = ();
my @csv;

my @episodes = &getEpisodeList();
foreach (@episodes) {
  if (!($_ =~ /pilot/i)) { 
    $results{$_} = dosearch($_);
    push(@csv, [$_, $_, $results{$_}]);
    sleep 10;  # Sleep for a while to avoid triggering quota issues
  }
}

my @values;
my @keys = sort(keys(%results));
my $key;
foreach $key (sort(keys(%results))) {
  push(@values, $results{$key});
}
my $maxYVal = (max @values) + 100;
print $maxYVal;

my $graph = GD::Graph::bars->new(800,600);
$graph->set( 
    x_label           => 'Episode',
    y_label           => 'Popularity',
    title             => 'Popularity of Big Bang Theory Episodes',
    y_max_value       => $maxYVal,
    transparent       => 0,
    bgclr             => qw(white),
    fgclr             => qw(black),
    textclr           => qw(black),
    x_labels_vertical => 1
) or die $graph->error;
my @data = (
  [@keys],
  [@values]
);
my $gd = $graph->plot(\@data) or die $graph->error;
open(IMG, '>BigBangTheoryPopularityChart.png') or die $!;
binmode IMG;
print IMG $gd->png;
close IMG;
open CSV, ">BigBangTheoryGraphData.csv";
foreach (@csv) {
  print CSV join(",", @$_), "\n";
}

sub getEpisodeList() {
  my @episodes = `curl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Big_Bang_Theory_episodes | grep '\\([a-zA-Z0-9 ]*\\).*/\\1/' -e 's/]*>//g' -e 's/"//g'`; 
  return @episodes; 
} 

sub dosearch { 
  chomp @_; my ($term) = @_; 
  $term =~ s/ /+/g; 
  my $agent = LWP::UserAgent->new(); 
  my $search = "${googurl}The+Big+Bang+Theory+${term}&key=${googleAPIkey}"; 
  $agent->timeout(1800); 
  print "$search\n"; 
  my $response = $agent->get($search); 
  die "Cant't get $googurl -- ", $response->status_line unless $response->is_success; 
  my $resp_content = $response->content; 
  # print "$resp_content\n"; 
  if ($resp_content =~ /"estimatedResultCount":"(\d+)"/) { 
    print "$1 results\n"; 
    return $1; 
  } else { 
    return 0; 
  } 
}

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