As a consultant based in Eastern Europe I find myself regulary having to do currency conversions between three currencies: Euro, Pound and Serbian dinar. Because the Serbian dinar is so little known, I needed a site with every currency in the world with up to date rates. Only the highly popular XE.com made the grade, but it is tiresome navigating to the universal currency page and filling in the form.
Here is a simple hack to make Opera to convert your specified currencies from the address bar using the xe.com conversion engine (considerably more accurate and stable than Yahoo).
Method 1 - Using the Opera Search.ini editor
[If you do not have the superb Search.ini editor (OPSed) you can download it free here.]
1. Open the Opera Search.ini editor (OPSed) and click add (to add a new search engine).
2. Set the search as User Defined.
3. In the name field, give the search a functional name like “Euro to Pounds“.
4. In the URL field input: http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi
5. Leave the search type as 0 and encoding as default (utf-8).
6. In the keyword field put in the shortcut you will use to do the searches in future.
NOTE: You might use something like etop (Euro to pounds) in the example above. This will mean that you will type etop [x amount] in to the address bar to have [x amount] converted from Euros to Pounds.
7. Tick “Is post”
8. In the Query field you need to specify what your currencies are.
Note: The query takes the form “Amount=%s&From=[currency_code]&To=[currency_code] . In this example of Euros to Pounds it is: Amount=%s&From=EUR&To=GBP . You can get a full list of supported currencies and their codes here.
9. Click “Add to user defined list”
10. Click OK.
11. In the OPSed main window, click save then restart Opera.
You should now be able to simply type the keyword specified in step 6 above followed by the amount and that amount will be converted between the currencies specified in step 8.
Method 2 - Adding a record to the Search.ini file
1. Edit search.ini
2. Add this record at the end:
[Search Engine [Last number in sequence]]
Name=[Functional Name]
URL=http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi
Query=Amount=%s&From=[Currency_Code]&To=[Currency_code]
Key=[easy to remember keyword]
Encoding=utf-8
Is post=1
Has endseparator=0
Search Type=0
Here is an example using Euro to US Dollar conversions
[Search Engine 42] (<--Note, last one was 41)
Name=Euro to Dollar
URL=http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi
Query=Amount=%s&From=EUR&To=USD
Key=etod
Encoding=utf-8
Is post=1
Has endseparator=0
Search Type=0
Save your search.ini file and restart Opera
Here are some pre-prepared Search Engines you can import into OPSed:
Euro to UK Pounds.se7
UK Pounds to Euro.se7
See also “How to Add Search Engines that use POST to Search.ini” where I learned how to do this with xe.com.
Happy converting!
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