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Question

How do I accurately determine the location of a visitor to my website?

Answer 1

+6 A:

It's called "geolocation", and it's been covered before.

Jim Puls 2009-02-26 17:44:10

Answer 2

A:

Hostip.info provides a free IP GeoLookup API for use in your application. However, IP lookups are NOT going to be consistent or reliable because of the ease of proxying. Anyone visiting your site from behind a proxy will likely be reported incorrectly.

However, it's the best you can do with an IP.

Andrew Flanagan 2009-02-26 17:46:24

Answer 3

+1 A:

If you mean 100% reliability, it is not there. But you can use MaxMind for geolocation, if reliable means less than 100%. They have an open source version:

http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

There is also a paid service, if you need more accuracy for your results.

Gregory A Beamer 2009-02-26 17:48:09

Answer 4

A:

Just for the country region. Geoip libraries are useful.

There's even a command line program in linux.

Also you can grab enviornment variables with your PHP script.

Here's a Perl script I wrote a while back to display the variables. Nothing fancy.

#!/usr/bin/perl

print 'Content-type: text/HTML' . "\n\n";
print "<body><center>";
print "<table border=1>";
print '<tr><td>' . $_ . "<td>" . $ENV{$_} . "<br>\n" foreach sort (keys(%ENV)) ;

You can see the browser

J.J. 2009-02-26 17:49:33

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How do I accurately determine the location of a visitor to my website?

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