Currency Conversion using PHP

Question

I'm looking for a way to convert any amount from one currency to another on a website. The user would enter something like '100' and select USD as the currency, and then chooses Australian or Canadian dollars as the currency to convert to. When he clicks the 'Convert' button, I'd like to convert that amount automatically, through some API, and show him the amount in the currency he chose to convert to.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can find a decent API at http://xurrency.com/api a call in the format below should respond with the desired output.

http://xurrency.com/api/{base}/{target}/{amount}

Answer 2

This isn't a trivial challenge, because currency fluctuates. Try something like this: http://www.kksou.com/php-gtk2/Joomla-Gadgets/Google-Currency-Converter-AJAX-version.php

Answer 3

A quick google search yielded:

http://blog.motane.lu/2008/12/19/currency-conversion-in-php/

which provides a php function that makes use of a google search (which allows one to convert currency) and then strips the tags.

Answer 4

You can get the daily EURO-based exchange rates from http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml

Answer 5

From PHP Snippets

function currency($from_Currency,$to_Currency,$amount) {
    $amount = urlencode($amount);
    $from_Currency = urlencode($from_Currency);
    $to_Currency = urlencode($to_Currency);
    $url = "http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=$amount$from_Currency=?$to_Currency";
    $ch = curl_init();
    $timeout = 0;
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch,  CURLOPT_USERAGENT , "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1)");
    curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
    $rawdata = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    $data = explode('"', $rawdata);
    $data = explode(' ', $data['3']);
    $var = $data['0'];
    return round($var,2);
}

You dont necessarily need cURL for that though. file_get_contents should do too if the allow_furl_open is enabled:

$result = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=100EUR=?USD');

This would return something like

{lhs: "100 Euros",rhs: "129.18 U.S. dollars",error: "",icc: true}

Answer 6

Hi, I like the first solution but there seems to be on BIG problem with it. I tried to implement it into a payment gateway but I kept on getting a result of 1. This perplexed me and I eventually found that it is because there is a space used by google for the thousands sparator. Thus the amount of 1 500.00 was returned as one since the rest was exploded. I have created a quick and dirty fix for it. Let me know if anyone else has experienced this problem. Here is my solution:

function currency($from_Currency,$to_Currency,$amount) {
  $amount = urlencode($amount);
  $from_Currency = urlencode($from_Currency);
  $to_Currency = urlencode($to_Currency);
  $url = "http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=$amount$from_Currency=?$to_Currency";
  $ch = curl_init();
  $timeout = 0;
  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch,  CURLOPT_USERAGENT , "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1)");
  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
  $rawdata = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  $data = explode('"', $rawdata);
  $data = explode('.', $data['3']);
  $data[0] = str_replace(" ", "",preg_replace('/\D/', '',  $data[0]));
  if(isset($data[1])){
    $data[1] = str_replace(" ", "",preg_replace('/\D/', '', $data[1]));
    $var = $data[0].".".$data[1];        
  } else{
    $var = $data[0];
  }
  return round($var,2); }

Answer 7

Hi user481996, as the spaces are creating a problem in the explode function, why cant you trim the amount prior to exploding it ?