In this web content, the author provides a small program that calculates when the US Dollar was at its highest against the Euro. The program uses various tools, such as curl, gunzip, and sqlite3, to download, decompress, and query the historical data published by the European Central Bank. The author also highlights the process of converting the data from “wide” format to “long” format using pandas. They acknowledge the inconvenience of cleaning up the data and mention that the ECB’s foreign exchange data is relatively easy to access compared to other sources. The author then demonstrates how to graph the data using gnuplot and shows a more sophisticated analysis using DuckDB. They praise the simplicity of using a zipfile with a CSV file and discuss the potential of open data as an open API. The author concludes by explaining the initial weakness of the Euro and how its exchange rate has changed over time.
https://csvbase.com/blog/5