GnuCash can't get currency quotes

I have just installed GnuCash and like it immensely. However when I tried to get a currency quote all I got was:

unable to retrieve quotes CURRENCY:USD

Not too useful! It has taken me a while to track down the problem even with Google, so I thought I would give a simple quick fix here. This quick fix is followed by a fuller description of the problem.

Locate the file Quote.pm on your computer. On my Mac it is in /Library/Perl/5.8.8/Finance. You must replace it with this version of Quote.pm

GnuCash will now be able to get currencies properly. You can test it with:

bin $ ./gnc-fq-dump currency USD EUR

1 USD = 0.6963 EUR

bin $ ./gnc-fq-dump currency EUR USD

1 EUR = 1.4362 USD

Note: It is not a good idea to trust code files from the web so you should really do a diff on your file and the new one before installing it. That way you can see that there is no malicious code there. If you do a diff command you should see something like the following. If you see extra code or are worried about what you see do not install it.

bash-3.2# diff -w -u Quote.pm.orig Quote.pm

--- Quote.pm.orig 2009-04-13 16:15:29.000000000 +0200

+++ Quote.pm 2009-08-28 15:42:25.000000000 +0200

@@ -1,5 +1,11 @@

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

#

+# Warning: This file has been edited to fix currencies not working because

+# the Yahoo page has changed. You should keep an eye out for an official

+# fix and use that when it comes out. This file may cause future problems

+# keep the old one available.

+#

+#

# Copyright (C) 1998, Dj Padzensky

# Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Linas Vepstas

# Copyright (C) 2000, Yannick LE NY

@@ -36,15 +42,17 @@

use Finance::Quote::UserAgent;

use HTTP::Request::Common;

use HTML::TableExtract;

+use Finance::Quote::Yahoo::Base qw/yahoo_request/;

use Encode;

use vars qw/@ISA @EXPORT @EXPORT_OK @EXPORT_TAGS

$VERSION $TIMEOUT %MODULES %METHODS $AUTOLOAD

$YAHOO_CURRENCY_URL $USE_EXPERIMENTAL_UA/;

-$YAHOO_CURRENCY_URL = "http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&submit=Convert&";

+#$YAHOO_CURRENCY_URL = "http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&submit=Convert&";

# If the above URL ever fails, try rewriting this module to use the URL below.

# $YAHOO_CURRENCY_URL = "http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=USDCAD%3DX";

+$YAHOO_CURRENCY_URL = "http://finance.yahoo.com/d";

@ISA = qw/Exporter/;

@EXPORT = ();

@@ -239,18 +247,13 @@

return $amount if ($from eq $to); # Trivial case.

- my $ua = $this->user_agent;

-

- my $data = $ua->request(GET "${YAHOO_CURRENCY_URL}from=$from&to=$to")->content;

- my $te = HTML::TableExtract->new( headers => ['Symbol', 'Bid', 'Ask'] );

- $te->parse(decode_utf8($data)); # The web page returns utf8 content which gives

- # a warning when parsing $data in HTML::Parser

+ my $symbol = "$from$to=X";

+ my @symbols = ($symbol);

+ my %info = yahoo_request($this,$YAHOO_CURRENCY_URL,\@symbols);

+ return undef unless $info{$symbol,"success"};

- # Make sure there's a table to parse.

- return undef unless ($te->tables);

+ my $exchange_rate = $info{$symbol,"last"};

- my $row = ($te->rows())[0];

- my ($exchange_rate) = $$row[1];

$exchange_rate =~ s/,// ; # solve a bug when conversion rate

# involves thousands. yahoo inserts

# a comma when thousands occur

It turns out to be a problem in the Perl Finance::Quote module because Yahoo have changed the way they have done their currency web page; that's the problem with page scraping. Anyway, I finally found a patch for the problem here but it did not work out of the box because I have the latest version of Finance::Quote and it was incompatible. So, after hand editing it I thought that I would make a patched of Finance::Quote version 1.16 available above.

Keep an eye on the official version and switch to that when it is released.

Happy Accounting!