PHP Regex for IP to Location API

Question

How would I use Regex to get the information on a IP to Location API

This is the API

http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100

I would need to get the Country Name, Region/State, and City.

I tried this:

$ip = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
$contents = @file_get_contents('http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=' . $ip . '');
$pattern = "/<CountryName>(.*)<CountryName>/";
preg_match($pattern, $contents, $regex);
$regex = !empty($regex[1]) ? $regex[1] : "FAIL";
echo $regex;

When I do echo $regex I always get FAIL how can I fix this

Answer 1

You really are better off using a XML parser to pull the information.

For example, this script will parse it into an array.

Regex really shouldn't be used to parse HTML or XML.

Answer 2

As Aaron has suggested. Best not to reinvent the wheel so try parsing it with simplexml_load_string()

// Init the CURL
$curl = curl_init();

// Setup the curl settings
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);

// grab the XML file
$raw_xml = curl_exec($curl);

curl_close($curl);

// Setup the xml object
$xml = simplexml_load_string( $raw_xml );

You can now access any part of the $xml variable as an object, with that in regard here is an example of what you posted.

<Response> 
    <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> 
    <Status>OK</Status> 
    <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> 
    <CountryName>United States</CountryName> 
    <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> 
    <RegionName>California</RegionName> 
    <City>Mountain View</City> 
    <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> 
    <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> 
    <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> 
    <Timezone>0</Timezone> 
    <Gmtoffset>0</Gmtoffset> 
    <Dstoffset>0</Dstoffset> 
</Response> 

Now after you have loaded this XML string into the simplexml_load_string() you can access the response's IP address like so.

$xml->IP;

simplexml_load_string() will transform well formed XML files into an object that you can manipulate. The only other thing I can say is go and try it out and play with it

EDIT:

Source http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.simplexml-load-string.php

Answer 3

If you really need to use regular expressions, then you should correct the one you are using. "|<CountryName>([^<]*)</CountryName>|i" would work better.