[RESOLVED] function to know IP geographical location of an user...

Pulsorock

Hello,

I need to set a filter for a client website than when an user's IP address is from United States show a message and if from somewhere else it displays another message. I know how to get the user IP and all that, but how do I identify the geographical location of that IP?

Thanks!

dalecosp

There are a number of "geolocation" services out there; I suppose you could subscribe to one, or attempt to write some script action that uses such a service to give an approximate "geolocation".

I'm not sure how these services work, either in terms of use, terms of payment, neither in terms of the backend technology.

It seems like it might be possible to hack something together if your environment had whois(1) installed. That might, in fact, be what a number of these "geolocation" services are using anyway. You can call whois(1) on an IP as well as a DNS name. Given that the output of whois(1) is fairly rigid, you might be able to isolate an approximate location.

Pulsorock

I found this site that I send the IP and it returns me an output similar to this:

http://netgeo.caida.org/perl/netgeo.cgi?target=209.85.165.104

VERSION=1.0

TARGET: 209.85.165.104
NAME: PDMS-209-85-160
NUMBER: 209.85.160.0 - 209.85.167.255
CITY: HOLLYWOOD
STATE: CALIFORNIA
COUNTRY: US
LAT: 34.09
LONG: -118.32
LAT_LONG_GRAN: City
LAST_UPDATED: 01-Jun-1999
NIC: ARIN
LOOKUP_TYPE: Block Allocation
RATING:
DOMAIN_GUESS: softaware.com
STATUS: OK

and the html output

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>NetGeo Results</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
VERSION=1.0<br>
<p>
TARGET:        209.85.165.104<br>
NAME:          PDMS-209-85-160<br>
NUMBER:        209.85.160.0 - 209.85.167.255<br>
CITY:          HOLLYWOOD<br>
STATE:         CALIFORNIA<br>

COUNTRY:       US<br>
LAT:           34.09<br>
LONG:          -118.32<br>
LAT_LONG_GRAN: City<br>
LAST_UPDATED:  01-Jun-1999<br>
NIC:           ARIN<br>
LOOKUP_TYPE:   Block Allocation<br>
RATING:        <br>
DOMAIN_GUESS:  softaware.com<br>

STATUS:        OK<br>
</BODY></HTML>

How can I in php read only the value of COUNTRY? How can I call that page in php and read the file and compare the value in COUNTRY and this way know where the IP is from?

bradgrafelman

Pulsorock wrote:
How can I in php read only the value of COUNTRY?

Well, you could load the HTML into a variable using [man]file_get_contents/man and use [man]preg_match/man like so:

preg_match('/COUNTRY:\s+([A-Z]+)/', $html_data, $matches);
$country = $matches[1];

Note that if the site changes their HTML formatting, it could easily break the regexp pattern. Also note that if their site becomes unavailable or extremely slow, it could bog down your site while your PHP scripts are waiting for the remote site to load/timeout.

Pulsorock

that worked for now... later I can take the considerations you mentioned.... thanks...

bradgrafelman

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved.

Twinkie

I use www.bytebuffet.com for geolocation and mapping. They have good documentation and examples. They're also in progress of building a free library of Flash animations.