A simple command-line tool to find the difference in purchasing power of the US dollar, as well as the cumulative percent of inflation, between two years.
The included cpi.csv file contains annual Consumer Price Indices from 1913 to 2016, sourced from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics website.
- A C compiler (gcc, clang, MSVC, etc.)
- CMake
In the top source directory, run:
cmake -B build
cmake --build buildThen run ./build/infcalc.
Make sure cpi.csv is in the same directory, or you'll get an error. CMake will
automatically copy the file to the build directory, but if you move the built
binary, the CSV needs to go with it.
Also, the program expects the CSV to have only two fields, year and CPI, separated by commas. Additional fields will be ignored. A header line (like the one in the included CSV file) is optional. If present, it will be ignored.
For now, the program just reads the CSV and spits formatted data out, but the
idea is to be able to compare the purchasing power of a given amount of USD for
two different years. For example, infcalc --amount 1.00 1913 2016 should
return $24.24. Optionally, the cumulative rate of inflation would be returned
if specified with a command-line flag.
- Accept user input to compare different years and amounts
- Include CPI data in a more portable way (instead of copying the CSV)
- Pull data directly from BLS via their API
This code is free to use, modify, and distribute according to the terms of the MIT License, the text of which is available in LICENSE.