3 steps to adding country detection to your site using php
Posted by by Sandy on 31st Oct, 2009
It is very easy to detect your users country and I’ll show you how using php.
Step 1 – Detect user IP address
PHP has wonderfully simple function do this. All you have to do is use:
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];We’re going to store this as a variable called ip:
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];Step 2 – Check location of IP address
We’re going check location of IP address with a function called locateip which uses the free geolocation API available at http://ipinfodb.com/
The locateip function has 4 sections as follows:
1. Make a request for an XML file from ipinfodb.com.
2. If first request fails make request to backup server.
3. Extract the country and country code from the XML.
4. Store everything in an array for convenience.
function locateIp($ip){
$data = file_get_contents("http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query_country.php?ip=$ip&output=xml");
//Use backup server if cannot make a connection
if (!$data){
$backup = file_get_contents("http://backup.ipinfodb.com/ip_query_country.php?ip=$ip&output=xml");
$answer = new SimpleXMLElement($backup);
if (!$backup) return false; // Failed to open connection
}else{
$answer = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
}
$country_code = $answer->CountryCode;
$country_name = $answer->CountryName;
//Return the data as an array
return array('ip' => $ip, 'country_code' => $country_code, 'country_name' => $country_name);
}
We would call the function using:
$ip_data = locateIp($ip);Step 3 – Display on page
All we have to do now is display the information on the page using the array
echo $ip_data['country_name'];You may wish to store details within session variables so you can use on multiple pages without having to perform the check again.
You can see the code in action at http://www.amgmedia.co.uk/country.php
I’ve went a little further and used the country code in combination with the free flag icons available from http://www.famfamfam.com to add the appropriate country flag. All the flags are named after the country code so it’s quite easy to do.
By making a slight change to the XML file requested from IPInfoDB you can also detect the users city with latitude and longitude. Check out the example at http://www.amgmedia.co.uk/location.php Although, this may not always be accurate depending on the users ISP. You will see I also added a map which is generated using the latitude and longitude and Google maps API.
IPInfoDB does not have a query limit as such but if you send an queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second they will be put in “queue”. If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second.
If your not too happy about having to rely on using an API then IPInfoDB lets you download their IP database as SQL and use what ever method you choose to query it.
On both examples I have provided you can look at the code and try it out on your own. Although, if your testing on a local server your IP address will show as 127.0.0.1 depending on how you have configured your localhost.
That’s all folks!
