I need to do 27 currency conversions 5 times per week.  I need a web
service so that the numbers can, automatically, be cached in my
database.

That's not a lot of traffic but I've been quoted a price of over $2000
/ year by a certain popular currency conversion web-site.

I found a few free services of varying reliability. One of them
(www.CurrencyServer.de) looked very promising (pretty reliable with up
to 4 different 'providers') but their conversion rates were too far
out-of-sync with popular sites such as ft.com, reuters.com and
www.xe.com (I'm guessing that these 3 are the most popular for people
working in finance) www.CurrencyServer.de rates were consistently 0.4%
out-of-sync with the average of the 3 sites above whereas those 3
popular sites agreed within 0.1% [which is fine by me as numbers will
only be shown to 3 significant figures.]


Q: Is there anyone using a cheap or free web service which gives rates
close to those provided by ft.com | reuters.com | www.xe.com ?

TYIA


PS: Don't email me, because I'm blocked from getting my mail just now.

PS: FYI I'm converting 9 Western European currencies and US dollars to
EUR, GBP, USD.

On 21 Jan, 12:57, "mark4asp"  wrote:
> I need to do 27 currency conversions 5 times per week.  I need a web
> service so that the numbers can, automatically, be cached in my
> database.

Use one of the popular and freely accessible "HTML formatted web
services"  8-)  and then Beautiful Soup (for Python) or similar to
dismember the ugly HTML it sends you to extract the data.

Message-ID: <00411a93$0$27561$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> from mark4asp
contained the following:

>I need to do 27 currency conversions 5 times per week.  I need a web
>service so that the numbers can, automatically, be cached in my
>database.
>
>That's not a lot of traffic but I've been quoted a price of over $2000
>/ year by a certain popular currency conversion web-site.

That's a ridiculous amount of money for data which should be publicly
available.

As a test I wrote this a few years ago
http://www.4theweb.co.uk/test/rates2.php  using rates scraped from
http://www.x-rates.com  

I'm pleased to say it still works.

Of course this is not the best solution, the page could change and at
worst the site could block access.  Surely you can get legitimate access
to the data for less than that?  It would be cheaper to get a hard up
student to enter them manually!
-- 
Geoff Berrow  0110001001101100010000000110
001101101011011001000110111101100111001011
100110001101101111001011100111010101101011
http://slipperyhill.co.uk - http://4theweb.co.uk

"Geoff Berrow"  wrote in message 
news:e7ben4tb0ps78gndbsrdqe282kko8ahnr7@4ax.com...

<snip>
>  It would be cheaper to get a hard up
> student to enter them manually!

Or even a hard up, ex, banker... :~o
-- 
Wikipedia: the Internet equivalent of
Hyde Park and 'speakers corner'...
Sorry, mail to this address goes unread.
Please reply via group.

On Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:21:08 +0000, Geoff Berrow put finger to
keyboard and typed:

>Message-ID: <00411a93$0$27561$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> from mark4asp
>contained the following:
>
>>I need to do 27 currency conversions 5 times per week.  I need a web
>>service so that the numbers can, automatically, be cached in my
>>database.
>>
>>That's not a lot of traffic but I've been quoted a price of over $2000
>>/ year by a certain popular currency conversion web-site.
>
>That's a ridiculous amount of money for data which should be publicly
>available.
>
>As a test I wrote this a few years ago
>http://www.4theweb.co.uk/test/rates2.php  using rates scraped from
>http://www.x-rates.com  
>
>I'm pleased to say it still works.
>
>Of course this is not the best solution, the page could change and at
>worst the site could block access.  Surely you can get legitimate access
>to the data for less than that?  It would be cheaper to get a hard up
>student to enter them manually!

If you're taking credit cards online, many payment gateway providers
include this data for free as part of their service. If you know where
to look, you can probably find where to get the data from providers
even if you're not actually using their services...

Mark
-- 
A Miscellany Of Good Stuff:
http://www.good-stuff.co.uk
http://namestore.good-stuff.co.uk
http://news.good-stuff.co.uk

On 21 Jan, 13:57, "mark4asp"  wrote:
> I need to do 27 currency conversions 5 times per week.  I need a web
> service so that the numbers can, automatically, be cached in my
> database.
>
> That's not a lot of traffic but I've been quoted a price of over $2000
> / year by a certain popular currency conversion web-site.
>
> I found a few free services of varying reliability. One of them
> (www.CurrencyServer.de) looked very promising (pretty reliable with up
> to 4 different 'providers') but their conversion rates were too far
> out-of-sync with popular sites such as ft.com, reuters.com andwww.xe.com(I'm guessing that these 3 are the most popular for people
> working in finance)www.CurrencyServer.derates were consistently 0.4%
> out-of-sync with the average of the 3 sites above whereas those 3
> popular sites agreed within 0.1% [which is fine by me as numbers will
> only be shown to 3 significant figures.]
>
> Q: Is there anyone using a cheap or free web service which gives rates
> close to those provided by ft.com | reuters.com |www.xe.com?

The European Central Bank (which isn't a bad source!) has a feed which
probably does what you want: http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml

This bit of PHP(4) will grab the results into $result - then simply
extract the rate you want with a bit of string manipulation. We
usually take a local cache of the rates each day to save going back to
the ECB all the time.

$url="http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml";
	$ctx = stream_context_create(array(
		'http' => array(
		'timeout' => 1
		)
	)
);
$result = file_get_contents($url);


Saul
www.notanant.com
Communities of websites

On 23 Jan, 08:33, saul.dob...@dobney.com wrote:
> On 21 Jan, 13:57, "mark4asp"  wrote:
>
>
>
> > I need to do 27 currency conversions 5 times per week.  I need a web
> > service so that the numbers can, automatically, be cached in my
> > database.
>
> > That's not a lot of traffic but I've been quoted a price of over $2000
> > / year by a certain popular currency conversion web-site.
>
> > I found a few free services of varying reliability. One of them
> > (www.CurrencyServer.de) looked very promising (pretty reliable with up
> > to 4 different 'providers') but their conversion rates were too far
> > out-of-sync with popular sites such as ft.com, reuters.com andwww.xe.com(I'mguessing that these 3 are the most popular for people
> > working in finance)www.CurrencyServer.derateswere consistently 0.4%
> > out-of-sync with the average of the 3 sites above whereas those 3
> > popular sites agreed within 0.1% [which is fine by me as numbers will
> > only be shown to 3 significant figures.]
>
> > Q: Is there anyone using a cheap or free web service which gives rates
> > close to those provided by ft.com | reuters.com |www.xe.com?
>
> The European Central Bank (which isn't a bad source!) has a feed which
> probably does what you want:http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml
>
> This bit of PHP(4) will grab the results into $result - then simply
> extract the rate you want with a bit of string manipulation. We
> usually take a local cache of the rates each day to save going back to
> the ECB all the time.
>
> $url="http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml";
>         $ctx = stream_context_create(array(
>                 'http' => array(
>                 'timeout' => 1
>                 )
>         )
> );
> $result = file_get_contents($url);
>
> Saulwww.notanant.com
> Communities of websites

There is a danger that you could be inadvertently presenting incorrect
information, so a thorough disclaimer would be in order.
I put a simple monitor on my personal site using xe.com, mainly for my
own purposes, but for some reason its become a real hit for the
general public, getting more hits than any of my other pages.

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:33:18 -0800 (PST), saul.dobney@dobney.com put
finger to keyboard and typed:

>On 21 Jan, 13:57, "mark4asp"  wrote:
>> I need to do 27 currency conversions 5 times per week.  I need a web
>> service so that the numbers can, automatically, be cached in my
>> database.
>>
>> That's not a lot of traffic but I've been quoted a price of over $2000
>> / year by a certain popular currency conversion web-site.
>>
>> I found a few free services of varying reliability. One of them
>> (www.CurrencyServer.de) looked very promising (pretty reliable with up
>> to 4 different 'providers') but their conversion rates were too far
>> out-of-sync with popular sites such as ft.com, reuters.com andwww.xe.com(I'm guessing that these 3 are the most popular for people
>> working in finance)www.CurrencyServer.derates were consistently 0.4%
>> out-of-sync with the average of the 3 sites above whereas those 3
>> popular sites agreed within 0.1% [which is fine by me as numbers will
>> only be shown to 3 significant figures.]
>>
>> Q: Is there anyone using a cheap or free web service which gives rates
>> close to those provided by ft.com | reuters.com |www.xe.com?
>
>The European Central Bank (which isn't a bad source!) has a feed which
>probably does what you want: http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml

Those are bank reference rates, though, which will differ from the
actual rates you'll be charged if you try to exchange real currency at
a typical bank or bureau d'exchange. Reuters, FT and Xe aim to give a
"best estimate" of current commercial rates, which is probably closer
to what the OP wants.

Mark
-- 
A Miscellany Of Good Stuff:
http://www.good-stuff.co.uk
http://namestore.good-stuff.co.uk
http://news.good-stuff.co.uk