The Cost of True Love (a.k.a. The Tidy — and expensive! — Twelve Days of Christmas)

I’m in the market for Christmas presents for my true love, @mrshrbrmstr, and thought I’d look to an age-old shopping list for inspiration. Just what would it set me back if I decided to mimic the 12 Days of Christmas in this modern day and age?

Let’s try to do the whole thing in R (of course!).

We’ll need to:

• Grab the lyrics
• Parse the lyrics
• Get pricing data
• Compute some statistics
• Make some (hopefully) pretty charts

This one was complex enough formatting-wise that I needed to iframe it below. Feel free to bust out of the iframe at any time.

Some good follow-ups to this (if you’re so inclined) would be to predict prices next year and/or clean up the charts a bit.

Grab the code up on GitHub.

(Note: ColourLovers API times out occasionally so just try that snippet again if you get an error).

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