Finding Geographical location from IP address

How to find the country from IP Address?

After a long search i could find a solution for that.

First function is for fetching contents from an API url
the API Url used here is http://api.hostip.info/?ip=Your IP Address

This function will work if your server allows thi stype of fetching from another server

 
function getCountryCityFromIP($ipAddr)
{
//function to find country and city from IP address
//Developed by Roshan Bhattarai http://roshanbh.com.np
//verify the IP address

ip2long($ipAddr)== -1 || ip2long($ipAddr) === false ? trigger_error("Invalid IP", E_USER_ERROR) : "";


        $ipDetail=array(); //initialize a blank array
        //get the XML result from hostip.info
        $xml = file_get_contents("http://api.hostip.info/?ip=".$ipAddr);



                //get the city name inside the node and
                preg_match("@(\s)*(.*?)@si",$xml,$match);
                //assing the city name to the array
                $ipDetail['city']=$match[2];
                //get the country name inside the node and
                preg_match("@(.*?)@si",$xml,$matches);
                //assign the country name to the $ipDetail array
                $ipDetail['country']=$matches[1];
                //get the country name inside the node and
                preg_match("@(.*?)@si",$xml,$cc_match);
                $ipDetail['country_code']=$cc_match[1]; //assing the country code to array
                //return the array containing city, country and country code
                return $ipDetail;

}

?>


If  Your server doesnot allow the above operation then we can use curl for doing it
Here using curl we get the out as XML from the API url to which we submits our request
the XMl string is parsed using php's XML Parsers and a response array is returned by the function
 

 
function getCountryCityFromIP_Curl($ipAddr){

// Initialize the cURL session

$ch = curl_init();
    $ipDetail=array(); //initialize a blank array
//Set the URL of the page or file to download.

//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.hostip.info/?ip=".$ipAddr);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.ipinfodb.com/v2/ip_query.php?key=<your_api_key>&ip=".$ipAddr."&timezone=false");

//Ask cURL to return the contents in a variable
//instead of simply echoing them to the browser.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Execute the cURL session

$contents = curl_exec ($ch);
// Close cURL session

curl_close ($ch);
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($xml_parser, $contents, $vals, $index);
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);

$params = array();
$level = array();
foreach ($vals as $xml_elem) {
  if ($xml_elem['type'] == 'open') {
    if (array_key_exists('attributes',$xml_elem)) {
      list($level[$xml_elem['level']],$extra) = array_values($xml_elem['attributes']);
    } else {
      $level[$xml_elem['level']] = $xml_elem['tag'];
    }
  }
  if ($xml_elem['type'] == 'complete') {
    $start_level = 1;
    $php_stmt = '$params';
    while($start_level < $xml_elem['level']) {
      $php_stmt .= '[$level['.$start_level.']]';
      $start_level++;
    }
    $php_stmt .= '[$xml_elem[\'tag\']] = $xml_elem[\'value\'];';
    eval($php_stmt);
  }
}

return  $params['RESPONSE'];


}

?>
 


//HOW TO CALL THIS FUNCTION

getCountryCityFromIP_Curl("192.178.0.11");

getCountryCityFromIP("100.123.0.11")

?>

In the second function that uses curl we are using the API webservice url
http://api.ipinfodb.com/v2/ip_query.php?key=<your_api_key>&ip=<your_ip_address>&timezone=false

example API request url:

http://api.ipinfodb.com/v2/ip_query.php?key=767ffd655&ip=112.189.98.110&timezone=false

This is a free webservice, but to access this you will need an API Key. To get An Api Key register with the website at the following location.

http://ipinfodb.com/register.php

you will get an activation email in your inbox, click the link and activate you account. After that generate an API key for you and put this key in your Request API Url.