Free solution to Ip->Country often-asked question

baffled_in_UK

Hi,

I have noticed quite a lot of posts asking how to get the country of origin from an IP address. I have found a free resource that you might find useful..
http://ip-to-country.com/

You can download a .csv file (updated monthly) with all the IP ranges. They even give you the code to format the IP address into an IP number.

Let me know if it helps anybody.

spcomputing_com

I'm in the UK, and I was mucking around and I put in 127.0.0.1 which is localhost and can be anywhere in the world. It said the IP was from the US...

I also tried 192.168.0.1 which many computers on a network use, and it said that was from the US too.

I don't think so 😃

baffled_in_UK

No information-gathering service is 100%

I for one am quite happy for a % in the high 90's.

If it receives the Ip addresses you mentioned and has to make a "guess" then picking the highest demographic is not an unrealistic outcome.

cyclops

Originally posted by spcomputing.com
I'm in the UK, and I was mucking around and I put in 127.0.0.1 which is localhost and can be anywhere in the world. It said the IP was from the US...

I also tried 192.168.0.1 which many computers on a network use, and it said that was from the US too.

I don't think so 😃

Yes, I do. I think they have done this for historical reasons.
In the late 1960s, the U.S. Defense Department created a network called ARPANET that linked military computers together.

The current Internet, and most other networks, are based on this ARPANET-model.
So it is kind of logical they classify private-ranges as being situated in the U.S.

WanderingMan

Hi,

someone else has probably answered this, but here it is again.
127.0.0.1 is a dummy IP address, which always refers to the computer you're on. If you look it up, then it has a dummy registration address in the USA.

The following address ranges
192.168.0.0/16
172.16.0.0/12
10.0.0.0/8
are "private" address ranges.

These don't work on the public Internet, but do work on private networks. They also have dummy registrations. Generally, ISP use private addresses for non-Internet bound traffic. If a user with a private address wants to access the Internet, then a proxy server is used. The proxy server will have a public address. The other possibility is the use of NAT, or network address translation.

Bottom line is that looking up any of these addresses will yield misleading results...

Hope this helps.

leatherback

Added to that last comment:

People who are accessing your website (Assuming it is not an INTRANET site) will be surfing the INTERNET. So they WILL have a valid IP address, which is registered to a valid location.
ONLY if your lookup database is old, will this lookup yield the wrong location, since, as far as I know, the ip-to-country lookup service is directly connected to the main IP registration & location.

To avoid having an old database...: Instead of downloading, use their online service. you can query their database online too.