How to get currency exchange rates in R

Question

Are there are any R packages/functions to get exchange rates in real time, e.g. from Google Finance? Would prefer to avoid RCurl or other parsers if something\'s already out

Answer 1

You could use historical_exchange_rates() from the priceR library.

E.g. to get the daily AUD to USD exchange rate from 2010 to 2020:

# install.packages("priceR")
library(priceR)

cur <- historical_exchange_rates("AUD", to = "USD",
                          start_date = "2010-01-01", end_date = "2020-06-30")

tail(cur)

       date one_AUD_equivalent_to_x_USD
 2020-06-25                    0.688899
 2020-06-26                    0.686340
 2020-06-27                    0.686340
 2020-06-28                    0.685910
 2020-06-29                    0.687335
 2020-06-30                    0.690166

dim(cur)
[1] 3834    2


# Plot USD vs AUD last 10 years
library(ggplot2)
library(tidyverse)

cur %>% 
  tail(365 * 10) %>% 
  rename(aud_to_usd = one_AUD_equivalent_to_x_USD) %>%  
  mutate(date = as.Date(date)) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = aud_to_usd, group = 1)) +
  geom_line() +
  geom_smooth(method = 'loess') + 
  theme(axis.title.x=element_blank(),
        axis.ticks.x=element_blank()) + 
  scale_x_date(date_labels = "%Y", date_breaks = "1 year")