bellewether / mood-analysis

Hash Practice using an NLP-like example

Mood Analysis: Hash Practice

Let's practice interacting with Hashes (key-value pairings) by writing a program that creates hashes, stores data in hashes, retrieves data from hashes, and prints the contents of a hash.

mood-analysis.rb

Take a look at mood-analysis.rb.

What's Happening?

Explain what is happening on each of the following lines in the code.

Line #	What's happening?
1
2
3
6
7-8
9
10
11
12
13
14
18-24

Data Types

What's the Data Type of the following?

Code	Data Type
FEELINGS
:sad
happy
words
words.split(" ")
FEELINGS[:sad]
FEELINGS[:happy].include?
analyze_mood(text)

Explaining the Code

Question	Answer
Why do we need line 9?
What is the relationship between words and word (line 10)?
Why doesn't line 19 have an associated if/condition?
What is the relationship between text[0], text[1], and words?

Assignment: Requirements

1. Replace lines 36 and 37 and write a loop to print out each day and the emoticon that is associated by analyzing the mood of that day.

Your result will look like:

03/01  :-(
03/13  :-|
...

think: Why does 03/13 come out as neutral when it should be happy? How could we fix this?

2. To make the results a little more accurate, let's write and utilize a method called strip_punctuation to strip out the punctuation that affects the results. Namely, remove exclamation marks (!), periods (.), commas (,), and hashtags (#).

Your method should take a string as an argument and return the string without the above mentioned punctuation.

After writing this method, our new result should be:

03/01  :-(
03/13  :-)
...

think: Where should we call strip_punctuation? Does it matter? Why?

3. Write a method called happy_days to determine how many logged entries it takes until there have been three :-) happy days.

Your output could be something like:

It takes 5 entries for 3 happy days to occur

think: What are you going to do if there aren't at least 3 happy days? Where do you need to handle that case?

4. Write a method called overall_mood to determine the most common mood across all logged entries.

Your output could be something like:

The most common mood is :-)

think: Should you use an array or a hash to solve this problem? Why?

think: What if we eventually want to add feelings to our analysis? Can we write this code in a way that will prevent us from having to re-write it later?