Get the visitor country

[Anon]

Hi,

anybody knows a easy way to get a visitor country in PHP ?

I have the IP but i dont know how to get the country..

thanks for your help!

beav

[[deleted]]

Search the forum a little...

[lucidfx]

$ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

$dns=gethostbyaddr($ip);
Then just parse everything right of the last . and that should be like org, uk , edu, com

[matjaz]

yes but that doesnt give you the country... i can have COM domain in china too...

[[deleted]]

Not a good example, .com, .org and .net domains are international.
But there's nothing stopping you from using
a .uk domain from sweden....

[Anon]

just wanted to add the final step in the process...

To convert .co.uk to United Kingdom etc.

I know you can have a .es in Honalulu but....

Here's a database freindly list of top level domains and their countries:

http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/codlstp1/db_en.html

And this site seems to offer more info than the one above (less db friendly though):

http://www.norid.no/domreg.html

[Anon]

so far i guess the best approach would:

1) when a visitor comes, check his IP
2) check whether this IP is already in your database

2a) if not, do whois and parse country from the response string. add this IP+country to the database so you will be able to find it next time, without doing whois.

2b) if this IP was already in your database, then just read the corresponding country.

this way you will soon have lots of IP's in the database but that is why we have databases, right :-)

note that "whois" takes some time... maybe its better to have a cronjob to go through unknown IP's while you are only inserting them to the database... i dont know.

any better ideas? if someone wrote something yet, let me know.