How to determine user's country?

Anon

How do I determine the country that a visitor to my PHP page is coming from and route them accordingly?

A (non-PHP) example of the behaviour I want is when I go to www.altavista.com and it automatically routes me to uk.altavista.com (as I am based in the UK).

How do you do this in PHP? Is there something you can check in the HTTP header?

Thanks,
Jon.

Anon

Hi,

Here is little code I use to get users country.

It is not superb but it works rather fine.

$host = gethostbyaddr($REMOTE_ADDR);
$hostdot=".";
$result = strrchr($host, $hostdot);

In result you will get e.g.
.be
.de
.uk
etc...

Hope this helps you out.

If someone knows a better way of how to get the country. Send me a comment cause I means there must be a better way of doing this.

Anon

Forgott to tell

But this returns also .com .net .org depends from what ISP the surfer is.

Anon

You could also find out what language they are using... i.e. if they are using American English they are (usually) from US and if they are using English (British) they are usually from the UK... although this is usually less reliable...

Anon

Excuse my ignorance, but how do you find out what language they are using? Is this sent with the header too?

Anon

try this - you will see all info available to you

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="php">
track_vars;
reset ($GLOBALS);
while (list ($key, $val) = each ($GLOBALS)) {
echo($key . "=>" . $val . "<br>");
}
echo("<BR><BR>" . gethostbyaddr($REMOTE_ADDR) . "<BR><BR>");
</SCRIPT>

yes, look for accept-language var in dump above