How do I use the Adapative Payments "ConvertCurrency" API in Perl? - perl

Question

How can you convert from multiple currencies, using the PayPal API (Adaptive Payments) system? The documents only have stuff for Ruby, iOS, PHP, Rails etc... but not Perl!
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/adaptive-payments/ConvertCurrency_API_Operation/

Answer 1

This is only meant as a guideline (to run in command line). It will run via the browser, but you need to add in a header (otherwise it'll give a 500 Internal Server Error)
The perl code is as follows:
currency.cgi
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use HTTP::Request::Common;
use LWP::UserAgent;
my $user = 'your PayPal API username';
my $password = 'your PayPal API password';
my $signature = 'your PayPal API signature';
my $application_id = 'APP-80W284485P519543T'; # this is the sandbox app ID... so you would just change this to your own app-id when going live
my #currencies = qw/GBP EUR CHF USD AUD/; # Enter all the currency codes you want to convert here
my $url = 'https://svcs.sandbox.paypal.com/AdaptivePayments/ConvertCurrency'; # remove the "sandbox." part of this URL, when its ready to go live...
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $headers = HTTP::Headers->new(
'X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-USERID' => $user,
'X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-PASSWORD' => $password,
'X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-SIGNATURE' => $signature,
'X-PAYPAL-APPLICATION-ID' => $application_id,
'X-PAYPAL-DEVICE-IPADDRESS' => $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR},
'X-PAYPAL-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT' => 'JSON',
'X-PAYPAL-RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT' => 'JSON'
);
foreach (#currencies) {
print qq|\nGetting exchange rates for $_.... \n|;
my ($status,$vals) = get_converted_amounts($_);
if ($vals->{error}) {
print qq|There was an error: $vals->{error}\n|;
exit;
} else {
print qq|Got conversion rates of:\n|;
foreach (#currencies) {
if ($vals->{$_}) {
print qq|\t$_ => $vals->{$_}\n|;
}
}
}
}
sub get_converted_amounts {
my ($currency_from) = #_;
my #currencies_to_grab;
foreach (#currencies) {
next if $_ eq $currency_from; # We dont wanna bother asking it to convert from this currency, into this currency =)
push #currencies_to_grab, $_;
}
my $json_var = {
requestEnvelope => {
detailLevel => "ReturnAll",
errorLanguage => "en_US",
},
baseAmountList => [{ 'currency' => { 'code' => $currency_from, 'amount' => 1 } }],
convertToCurrencyList => [{ currencyCode => \#currencies_to_grab }]
};
use JSON;
my $new_json = JSON::to_json($json_var);
my $request = HTTP::Request->new( 'POST', $url, $headers, $new_json );
my $response = $ua->request( $request );
my $json_returned = decode_json($response->decoded_content);
if ($json_returned->{error}[0]) {
return (0, { error => "There was an error: $json_returned->{error}[0]->{message} ($json_returned->{error}[0]->{errorId}) " });
}
my $vals;
foreach (#{$json_returned->{estimatedAmountTable}->{currencyConversionList}[0]->{currencyList}->{currency}}) {
$vals->{$_->{code}} = $_->{amount};
}
return (1,$vals);
}
Running it:
You would simply run it via SSH/Telnet, with:
perl /path/to/script/currency.cgi
You can play around with the currency codes (be sure to only use the currencyCode values found here: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/adaptive-payments/ConvertCurrency_API_Operation/, as these are the only ones that are supported)
Although this converts from a given currency into the other related currencies (good if you want to run the script every couple of hours, and store the conversion rates) - it wouldn't be hard to tweak it so you can do:
convert(from_currency,to_currency,amount)
Hopefully this will save someone a bit of time (as I spent almost a day trying to get this going)