At the end of the Reading and writing files section, we learned how to download files from the internet. Let's use this knowledge to download some currency exchange rates data from Floatrates (http://www.floatrates.com/). As one of its many services, this website offers the current exchange rates of any currency compared to most common currencies. These rates can be obtained in XML or JSON format. For example, the URL http://www.floatrates.com/daily/USD.xml shows a spreadsheet layout of currencies compared to the US dollar (USD):
For example, today (Mar 23, 2018) it shows that 1 USD is worth 0.81191502 Euros (EUR). The resource for this nice web page is an XML file, in which all exchange rate data are stored, in our case, USD.xml.
We now know how to download this data and store it in a local rates.xml file for further processing:
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