Razor/Razor Blade analytics

Hi everyone,

As I was reading the thread what razor/blade did you use today, it dawned on me that it would be cool to extract data out of the thread and chart it to find various useful things. I think it would be cool to see Most popular razor, most popular blade, but also whats the most popular blade for each razor. I began doing this but realized the thread is over 2k pages long and im on page 7. Anybody want to help me compile this information if it has not already been done? I tried to see if there was a way to export a thread to excel but I couldnt find anything. PM me if this is of any interest to you.

Here is the first bit of data I took out. Not very useful but I think its cool nonetheless.

Out of 127 posts here is how the blade preference stacks up

Interesting table. Thanks for your hard work.

Here's a thread I started with various blades suggested from this site. I decided to buy a few of each and post my findings. As you can see it just started and its based on vintage Gillette's both TTO's and adjustable. Feel free to use any info you find to assist your research. I would be really interested in the overall findings.
http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/432010-4-1-2-months-of-test-blades?highlight=

Its a pretty easy task, just with the amount of posts, very time consuming.

This would be a very interesting project. I hope you can find a way to extract the data more easily. Sounds like a web scraping software with word statistic abilities is what you need. Wish I could suggest one but I never looked into that. Good luck.

Monarch software has a data mining tool.

Mhaz said:

This would be a very interesting project. I hope you can find a way to extract the data more easily. Sounds like a web scraping software with word statistic abilities is what you need. Wish I could suggest one but I never looked into that. Good luck.

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I agree, the problem im seeing is people refer to their razors and blades differently. While somebody might call it a superspeed, somebody else might call it an SS and/or mentioning tip colors, years etc... maybe the software can account for this somehow, im not familiar with any of it.

jackgoldman123 said:

Monarch software has a data mining tool.

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ill def look into it. Thanks bud!

Monarch software looks pretty cool except Im not sure it supports mac

EvanS said:

Monarch software looks pretty cool except Im not sure it supports mac

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Doesn't seem like it. I use Linux but I found two that are python based and should work for you. Not sure if I can post direct links ( even though they're both free so I'll risk it).
1. http://scrapy.org/ 2. https://code.google.com/p/sitescraper/

Python will work amazing. I scrape data all the time. You may have to do some cleanup, but it wouldn't be too bad.

Earlier today, I saw this firefox add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/html-regex-data-extractor/

If you are decent with programming regular expressions I think it could extract most of the blade brands for you (on a page by page basis).

Exceptions that might be tricky (or even infeasible) to do in an automated fashion:
- "+1" posts
- excluding mentions of brands posted within quotes from a prior post
- abbreviations/synonyms/misspellings for brands


Just a thought.


Cheers,
Shawn

Thanks although I did give up in this venture. Also people refer to razors and razors blades differently so that might make it tougher

I think the issue is some people consistently post in there the same razor they use which would skew results as it looks like a popular razor but it is really one person using the same razor.