FixerR

DSCI 525 Group Project, April 2018

Collaborators:

• Guanchen Zhang
• Shun Chi
• Xiaomeng (Sophia) Wang
• Xin (Alex) Guo

Overview

FixerR is an R API wrapper package for the APIs provided by Fixer for current and historical foreign currency exchange rates.

Powered by 15+ exchange rate data sources, the Fixer API is capable of delivering real-time exchange rate data for 170 world currencies. The API comes with multiple endpoints, each serving a different use case. Endpoint functionalities include getting the latest exchange rate data for all or a specific set of currencies, converting amounts from one currency to another, retrieving Time-Series data for one or multiple currencies and querying the API for daily fluctuation data.

This R package implements the APIs offered in the free tier, including queries for:

• the current exchange rates based on a reference currency
• historical exchange rates on a given date
• historical exchange rates within a given date range (no more than 30 days)

Users can define the target and base currencies and the date range.

Functions

• get_current_rate

This function can get the latest currency exchange rate for two specified currencies.

• get_historical_rate

This function can get the historical currency exchange rate on a specified date for two specified currencies.

• get_period_rate

This function can get daily historical currency exchange rates for two specified currencies between two dates of your choice, with a maximum time frame of 30 days.

Installation

To install FixerR, follow the steps below:

1. Get a Fixer API Access Key from here.

2. If you want to view the vignettes, run the following R code to setup your API key on your local machine.

Sys.setenv("ACCESS_KEY" = "YOUR_KEY")

3. Check if devtools has been installed. If not, run install.packages("devtools") to install devtools from CRAN.

4. Run the following to install FixerR:

devtools::install_github("UBC-MDS/FixerR", build_vignettes = TRUE)

If you do not need the vignettes, set build_vignettes = FALSE or ignore the argument.

5. After the installation, run the following to view the vignettes.

library(FixerR)
browseVignettes('FixerR')

6. You are all set to go!

Usage

library(FixerR)

1. get_current_rate(symbol, base_symbol, access_key)

   • Arguments:
     • symbol: currency symbol of interest, for example "CAD"
     • base_symbol: currency symbol as a reference base 1, for example "USD"
     • access_key: access key for the fixer.io api, a string.
   • Return:
     • latest currency exchange rate between these two currencies
   • Example:
     • get_current_rate('CAD', 'EUR', access_key = your_key)

2. get_historical_rate(date, symbol, base_symbol, access_key)

   • Arguments:
     • date: the date of interest, a string in the format 'YYYY-MM-DD'
     • symbol: currency symbol of interest, for example "CAD"
     • base_symbol: currency symbol as a reference base 1, for example "USD"
     • access_key: access key for the fixer.io api, a string.
   • Return:
     • currency exchange rate on the specified date
   • Example:
     • get_historical_rate('2018-01-01', 'CAD', 'EUR', access_key = your_key)

3. get_period_rate(start_date, end_date, symbol, base_symbol, access_key)

   • Arguments:
     • start_date: the start date of interest, a string in the format 'YYYY-MM-DD'
     • end_date: the end date of interest, a string in the format 'YYYY-MM-DD'
     • symbol: currency symbol of interest, for example "CAD"
     • base_symbol: currency symbol as a reference base 1, for example "USD"
     • access_key: access key for the fixer.io api, a string.
   • Return:
     • a data frame of the currency exchange rates in the specified period
   • Example:
     • get_period_rate('2018-01-01', '2018-01-15', 'CAD', 'EUR', access_key = your_key)

Contributing

We welcome all suggestions and PRs. Please find the document here for more information on how to contribute to this project ✨ ✨ ✨