README

Utility to retrieve the Exchanges Rates for a number of currencies every week/day

Was in Perl, relying on WebScraping, but that stopped working in 2023, so re-written in Python using a free API with limited accesses per month;

Credentials

to sign-up for the API key, go here: https://apilayer.com/marketplace/exchangerates_data-api and complete the sign-up process. For such a low-volume task as this one, the free tier is fine, with 250 requests per month. Credentials are stored in a credentials.json file, which is not in the repo, for obvious reasons. This file is of the form:

{
    "api-key": "[REDACTED]"
}

This credential will be given when you register for the API service.

Completed Tasks

• Perl scripts has stopped working on 2023/04/08 due to external site changes
• Replaced with Python utility and API access from here:
• https://exchangeratesapi.io/documentation/ instead

1. infill the earlier dates with: - Done

   for year in $(seq 2006 2015); do ./get_exchange_rates.py $year-12-31 365; done

2. Tidy up the API response. - Done

3. Remove the credentials from the Development Branch - Done

4. Normalize the timestamp - it should be '%Y%m%d_%H%M%S' everywhere - Done

TODO: Tasks to be undertaken in the future

5. Sort out the sorting on date when combining.
6. Deal with some of the older entries having identical timestamps and different data. This is due to multiple retrievals on the same day, but the older data only recorded the timestamp to the nearest day. - Pending