get user location

[chuender]

i need to capture visitor's location state. what is the best way to do this?

[NogDog]

An HTML form input with a <select> element for state? (There are IP address databases available which can give you a pretty good guess, but they are not fool-proof and may give completely wrong results if the data is bad/outdated or if the user is accessing your site via a remote proxy server.)

[etully]

NogDog is right, the databases aren't perfect but they're pretty good.
www.maxmind.com

[The-Master]

There are free databases which are (I think) about 60% or 70% accurate but paid for ones are about 95% accurate. This is why when I was outputting the users location I got data from another site which used GET data for the ip address and then made it output the location. I found that more effective.