Comments on: Currency conversion API on a shoestring

By: Adam

Adam — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:47:26 +0000

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS. Customized it for my needs and works perfect!

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:19:22 +0000

@stephen the code example has “smart quotes”, replace all of them with ‘ and that should do it.

By: Stephen Young

Stephen Young — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:19:19 +0000

I am using Firefox and get the Firebug error “missing name after . operator” for line 2 in the convert.php file. This is the line:
$url=’http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=’.$from.’&to=’.$to.’&submit=Convert’;

Any ideas what is wrong?

By: Neville Newey

Neville Newey — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:29:29 +0000

> This is a terrible dirty hack and if Yahoo finance ever changes their HTML (and they will), this will cease to work.

You can use the following url instead: http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=USDGBP=X&f=sl1d1t1ba&e=.csv, which will get the data in .csv format and then you don’t need to parse any html. The third parameter (f) can be modified to your needs, it specifies the order of fields returned in the file.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:14:27 +0000

Hey Chris,

Within character classes the pipe symbol is a literal character rather than an alternation operator so [A-Z|a-z] means match any upper or lower case letter or the character “|”. As a result you should be able to safely remove all of the pipes for your regex to still match.