Making Sense of Base/Quote Currency Ordering for Symbol Strings

[nh43de]

Ok,

So typically a currency pair is expressed as BASE-QUOTE (note ordering)

E.g.

• EUR-USD is 1.2
• XLM-BTC is 0.0000077

Some exchanges list these reverse, e.g. Bittrex. For these exchanges that list the symbols in reverse, there is a property called MarketSymbolIsReversed which will translate symbols for the exchange properly. However, it does not function as designed.

When translating between global market symbols <->exchange symbols, there is some unexpected behavior based on our assumptions above. See the following evaluations (this is using the Bittrex API where MarketSymbolIsReversed = true):

1. gms (global market symbol) above should be "XLM-BTC" because Bittrex symbols are reversed, and XLM is the base currency, so using global standards of BASE-QUOTE, it should be "XLM-BTC" but it does not evaluate as such

2. ems (exchange market symbol) should be "BTC-XLM" because again, using global standards of BASE-QUOTE, and Bittrex is reversed, converting "XLM-BTC" global ticker to market ticker should evaluate to "BTC-XLM", which is the Bittrex market ticker
3. ems2 is correctly evaluated to the exchange market symbol for Bittrex composed using the base/quote currency strings as separate inputs
4. gms2, which is the global market symbol of the "BTC-XLM" market on the Bittrex exchange should be "XLM-BTC", again because XLM is the base currency

The comments in the code are confusing/ambiguous at best and contradictory at worst:

Can someone shed some light on this?

[vslee]

I'll let @jjxtra comment, as he did most of the work on the global market symbols.

[jjxtra]

This is the beauty of open source. Feel free to submit a pr and we will have a look!

[nh43de]

@jjxtra I want to make sure there's unit tests etc. for this and make sure the PR is well done.. it may take some time. Will circle back in the next 30-60 days.

[jjxtra]

Thanks for even being willing to share at all, no rush at all :)

[nh43de]

Created PR #515

Thanks for this awesome project