A ruby-style currency converter

Though it is said that we live in a highly-globalized world, all countries still have their own proper currency (with one exception that I know of, the euro) so we still need to convert between them. If one is used to shop online (and one is) the need to get the price in the national currency occurs quite often. Going to a currency converter page is not much of a hassle but it still takes too much time and it seemed an overshoot to use a browser for this task. Inspired by Rails’s date calculations extensions (where you could write 3.days.ago), I decided to create something similar and see how much flying to Barcelona or buying a PragProg book costs from the command line.


require "net/http"
require "open-uri"
require "hpricot"

# makes 1284.eur.to.usd types of queries possible
class CurrencyConverter
 
  Currencies = { :huf => "HUF", :eur => "EUR", :usd => "USD", :gbp => "GBP", :chf => "CHF" }
 
  # these methods "close" the quote.
  # when they are called, it means all data is ready
  # the quote can be sent.
  class_eval do
    Currencies.each_key do |curr|
      define_method curr do
        @to = curr
        calculate
      end
    end
  end
 
  def initialize(amount, from=nil, to=nil)
    @amount = amount
    @from = from
    @to = to
  end
 
  def send_request_for_quote
   from_as_param = @from.to_s.upcase
   to_as_param = @to.to_s.upcase
   url = "http://xurrency.com/#{[@amount, @from, @to].join('/')}/feed"
   doc = Hpricot(open(url).read)
   (doc/'dc:value').inner_html
  end
 
  def calculate
    send_request_for_quote
  end

  def to
    self
  end
 
end

class Fixnum 
  def method_missing(name)
    CurrencyConverter.new(self, name)   
  end
end

Thanks to ruby’s open classes, the code is quite terse (you can also see and download the raw script from here). Now you can fire up irb and do all the conversions you want:

$ irb -r currency_converter.rb 
irb(main):001:0> 23.eur.to.huf
=> "6473.3500"
irb(main):002:0> 1.usd.to.eur
=> "0.7642"

Or do it through the ruby interpreter:

$ ruby -r rubygems -r currency_converter.rb -e "puts 1.eur.to.usd"
1.3085

I find it very pleasing to be able to write “10.eur.to.usd” since it is so close to our spoken, human language. One of ruby’s numerous charms.

My friend, Peter sent a more general solution that uses html scraping with Scrubyt and the conversion capabilities of Google search:

require 'rubygems'
require 'cgi'
require 'scrubyt'

begin
google_converter = Scrubyt::Extractor.define do
  fetch "http://www.google.com/search?q=#{CGI::escape(ARGV[0])}+#{CGI::escape(ARGV[1])}+to+#{CGI::escape(ARGV[2])}"
  
  google_result "//td[@dir='ltr']" do
    final_result(/= (.+) /)
  end
end
  puts google_converter.to_hash[0][:final_result]
rescue
  puts "Sorry, even *google* can't translate that!"
end

Using this you can convert amounts between any two currencies (distances, weights, etc., everything that Google search can handle):

$ ruby conv.rb 30 EUR HUF

It may be swimming against the current but I like solutions that do not need the browser for simple problems like this one. I scratched my itch and hopefully scratched yours, too.

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