Currency Convertor

[Dumzaz]

My site advertises/sells products to an international market. I want to be able to place my price in rands and have the price rendered on their currency, based on the current exchange rate for that day.

I am using PHP for scripting. Any ideas, please?

 

[Franna]

Use the following free API service which is updated every 12 hours:
http://xurrency.com/api

Use the NuSoap library from:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/
http://code.google.com/p/nusoap-for-php5/

 

[zamrg]

I recently did a job like this and landed up using the http://themoneyconverter.com/USD/rss.xml rss xml feed. If you go to themoneyconverter.com, you can get the rss feed in the base currency of your choice but in my case, the client wanted it in terms of US dollars. The feed is AFAIK updated every 5 minutes but I'm not sure as to how reliable it is. The site I did pulls exchange rates every 8 minutes and updates them locally, which the website pulls from a database.

I think it's preferable that one use a paid data source for online currency conversions and especially when dealing with online transactions, but in my case, we had a tight budget and opted for a free source. I would definitely suggest testing it's accuracy first against that of xe.com.

 

[MielieSpoor]

if you are willing to pay, you can go to www.xe.com. They give you the exchange rate everytime you do a request, ie realtime. ex.com is the most realiable I've found on the net! Just subscribe to the XE data feed.

 

[Dumzaz]

Thanks, I will give them all a try. To test I will just need to change regional settings on my machine to see what a user in China may see ontheir side, right?

 

[MielieSpoor]

Yes. Just remember to set it back, lol