Word clouds, which I’m sure you’ve all seen, are created using wordcloud, a famous Python library. This article will detail how to use wordcloud to create a word cloud for “Dream of the Red Chamber,” one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels.

1. Preparation

This involves three parts:

1. Install wordcloud and jieba

You can install them with pip install wordcloud and pip install jieba.

2. Prepare a Chinese font file

3. Prepare the text file

The .txt file and the font file are bundled so this example is easier to reproduce.

2. Drawing the “Dream of the Red Chamber” Word Cloud

Here’s the code directly:

    from wordcloud import WordCloud
    import jieba
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    text = "".join(jieba.cut(open("红楼梦.txt").read()))
    wordcloud = WordCloud(font_path="kaibold.ttf").generate(text)

    # Display the generated image:
    plt.imshow(wordcloud, interpolation='bilinear')
    plt.axis("off")
    plt.margins(x=0, y=0)
    plt.show()

Entering the Qianqian Music homepage and selecting Jay Chou’s “Confession Balloon” reveals that it’s a 2016 song with no preview available, which is sad. Is there a way to get the MP3 file? The answer is yes. A runnable program for music download is available at the end of the article.

Without further ado, I opened the charts and chose a new song that could be previewed; “Sheng Pi Zi” was the first one I could listen to.

1. Analyze API information

Opening the developer tools, I found that music files are definitely submitted through an API. Among many requests, I found a request that could retrieve music files. See the image below:

Check the request details:

The songid parameter can be found in the current URL: http://music.taihe.com/song/611238837. It’s simple. from should be “web” or “app”, etc. The format defining the return data type doesn’t need to be changed. method doesn’t need to be changed. The _ parameter is a 13-digit timestamp. callback is the prefix of the returned JSON data. The 1546915161467 after the underscore is a 13-digit timestamp, while the preceding 17200943498528136486 is unknown. We’ll try to use the known parameters to see if we can retrieve information without changing the unknown content.

Entering the Qianqian Music homepage and selecting Jay Chou’s “Confession Balloon” reveals that it’s a 2016 song with no preview available, which is sad. Is there a way to get the MP3 file? The answer is yes. A runnable program for music download is available at the end of the article.

Without further ado, I opened the charts and chose a new song that could be previewed; “Sheng Pi Zi” was the first one I could listen to.

1. Analyze API information

Opening the developer tools, I found that music files are definitely submitted through an API. Among many requests, I found a request that could retrieve music files. See the image below:

Check the request details:

The songid parameter can be found in the current URL: http://music.taihe.com/song/611238837. It’s simple. from should be “web” or “app”, etc. The format defining the return data type doesn’t need to be changed. method doesn’t need to be changed. The _ parameter is a 13-digit timestamp. callback is the prefix of the returned JSON data. The 1546915161467 after the underscore is a 13-digit timestamp, while the preceding 17200943498528136486 is unknown. We’ll try to use the known parameters to see if we can retrieve information without changing the unknown content.