Off Topic ... Maybe?

[Stuart Taylor]

I want to find a good source for importing currency rates into filemaker.

XE ... Oanda ... great services for currency rates of course but ... Not free.

Bank sources don't seem quite up to it. (dodgy commas, not enough currencies, wrong format, etc...)

Anyone know how to find out where the BUILT IN CALCULATOR IN OSX gets its currency data.

Its free and i hope its XML ... but i have not got the first idea how to find the source.

Sorry if this is too off topic.

[Wim Decorte]

http://www.ecb.int/stats/exchange/eurofxref/html/index.en.html

From the European Central Bank. Not a web service per se since you can't query it. But you can use their XML.

[Stuart Taylor]

This is the previous source (old fmp example) that i had dismissed.

Looks like they changed the dodgy "," for a "." ... this may actually work YAY!!!

gonna start building a file to get http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-hist.xml data into a table that contains one currency and date occurance into one record ... will post progress ... any help would be appreciated. (I'm an XML novice).

thanks Wim ... Lets see what we can do.

Best Stuart

[comment]

I don't think there ever was a problem with "dodgy commas" on that site.

[Stuart Taylor]

Hey Comment,

FileMaker.com had a .fp5 example that pulled data from that site ... only thing was the points 1.5654 where commas 1,5654 and for some reason there was no way of changing that comma as it was not a standard comma... I remember trying and trying (even copying it into a gText field failed). It was an issue that several people had discussed if i remember correctly.

I may be mistaken.

[comment]

Yes, I know that demo - it's still available at FMI's XSLT Library - but I could never understand the problem, if there was one.

I got the impression that the original xml document used decimal POINTS, and the demo author worked very hard to transform them into decimal commas, which I don't think is necessary for the import, even if your OS/file is set to use decimal comma. IIRC, I tested this at some point, but I could be mistaken about that (and my tests were performed with version 7).