Last modified: Jul 01, 2023 By Alexander Williams
Build a Live Currency Converter in Python
In this guide, we'll build a simple live currency converter using Python and API.
Technologies
In this guide, we'll need the following library:
- requests
requests is a library that is used for making HTTP requests. We'll use it to make an HTTP GET request to the ExchangeRate-API to fetch the latest exchange rates.
You can install the requests library using the following command:
pip install requests
Build Currency Converter
To build a live currency converter, we'll use ExchangeRate-API. This API is a web service that provides currency exchange rate data.
Here is our Currency Converter function:
import requests
def convert_currency(amount, from_currency, to_currency):
base_url = "https://api.exchangerate-api.com/v4/latest/"
# Fetch latest exchange rates
response = requests.get(base_url + from_currency)
data = response.json()
if 'rates' in data:
rates = data['rates']
if from_currency == to_currency:
return amount
if from_currency in rates and to_currency in rates:
conversion_rate = rates[to_currency] / rates[from_currency]
converted_amount = amount * conversion_rate
return converted_amount
else:
raise ValueError("Invalid currency!")
else:
raise ValueError("Unable to fetch exchange rates!")
The convert_currency
function has the following parameters:
amount
: The amount of currency that you want to convert.from_currency
: The currency you want to convert from.to_currency
: The currency you want to convert to.
Now let's see how to use the function.
# Convert 100 USD to EUR (live rates)
amount = 100
from_currency = "USD"
to_currency = "EUR"
converted_amount = convert_currency(amount, from_currency, to_currency)
print(f"{amount} {from_currency} is equal to {converted_amount} {to_currency}")
Output:
100 USD is equal to 91.7 EUR
As demonstrated, we have converted 100 USD to EUR and obtained the above output.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have learned how to build a simple live currency converter using Python and the ExchangeRate-API.
This converter lets us easily convert between currencies based on real-time exchange rates.
If you are interested in getting the currency of any country, visit How to Get The Currency of any Country in Python.