Website visitor

[RON_ron]

I need to implement a way to check if the web user belongs to 2 selected countries. can the IP address be used to identify the country?Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

[Christian F.]

Not reliably, no. You can use the IP to determine which country the ISP is registered in, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the user belong to that country as well.

After all, people go on holidays as well as using proxies, and nothing's to say that the geolocation database of your provider is correct. I've had my IP identified as belonging to the Netherlands, quite a few times, and others no result at all.

 

Best way is to ask the user, and then save the result in the database or a cookie.

[QuickOldCar]

As Christian said, not reliably.

 

http://www.maxmind.com/en/geolocation_landing

http://www.geoplugin.net

 

can try this

 

$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

//if running this code locally, to get a result
if($ip == $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR']){
$ip = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
}
echo $ip."<br />";
$geolocation = unserialize(file_get_contents('http://www.geoplugin.net/php.gp?ip='.$ip));
$geo_city = trim($geolocation['geoplugin_city']);
$geo_country = $geolocation['geoplugin_countryName'];
$location = $geo_city.",".$geo_country;
echo "Location: ".$location."<br />";

 

What you do with their city,country info would be up to you, save it to a user session or database

[QuickOldCar]

It seems the code had a hard time displaying this

 

geoplugin.net/php.gp?ip='.$ip

Edited October 7, 2012 by QuickOldCar