Retrieve the country code in PHP - php

Question

I'm a little lost with that.
How can I retrieve the ISO country code of the visitors at one php page?
Thanks advance

Answer 1

You can either do this by Geolocation of the IP or by inspecting the right headers.
Usually you want the latter, since it tells you which languages the browser/system uses. You will only want to use geolocation when you want to know the physical location.
The header is stored in $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']. It contains comma-separated entries, e.g.: en-GB,en;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,nl;q=0.4 (my own)
The HTTP Accept Language parameters seperates it's languages by a comma, it's properties by a semicolon. The q-value is from 0 to 1, with 1 being the highest/most preferred. Here is some naive and untested code to parse it:
$langs = explode(',', $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);
$preffered = "";
$prefvalue = 0;
foreach($langs as $lang){
$info = explode(';', $lang);
$val = (isset($lang[1])?$lang[1];1);
if($prefvalue < $val){
$preferred = $lang[0];
$prefvalue = $val;
}
}
Much simpler is it if you want to test if a specific language is accepted, e.g. Spanish (es):
if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], "es") !== false){
// Spanish is supported
}

Answer 2

I think you could use this php script which uses an ip and prints out a country code
Example
http://api.hostip.info/country.php?ip=4.2.2.2
Gives US
Check out
http://www.hostip.info/use.html
for more info.

Answer 3

A library i use myself and can recommend, is MaxMind GeoLite Country. To get the country code, you need only to copy 2 files to your server, the php code geoip.inc and the binary data GeoIP.dat.
Using the library is also very straightforward:
function ipToCountry()
{
include_once('geoip/geoip.inc');
$gi = geoip_open(__DIR__ . '/geoip/GeoIP.dat', GEOIP_STANDARD);
$result = geoip_country_code_by_addr($gi, $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
geoip_close($gi);
return $result;
}

Answer 4

This will use GeoIp and fall back to accept_lang
class Ip2Country
{
function get( $target )
{
$country = false;
if( function_exists( 'geoip_record_by_name' ) )
$country = $this->getFromIp( $target );
if( !$country && isset( $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] ) )
$country = $this->getFromLang( $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] );
return $country;
}
function getFromIp( $target )
{
$dat = #geoip_record_by_name( $target );
return ( isset( $dat['country_code'] ) ) ? mb_strtolower( $dat['country_code'] ) : false;
}
function getFromLang( $str )
{
$info = array();
$langs = explode( ',', $str );
foreach( $langs as $lang )
{
$i = explode( ';', $lang );
$j = array();
if( !isset( $i[0] ) ) continue;
$j['code'] = $i[0];
if( strstr( $j['code'], '-' ) )
{
$parts = explode( '-', $j['code'] );
$j['lang'] = $parts[0];
$j['country'] = mb_strtolower( $parts[1] );
}
$info[] = $j;
}
return ( isset( $info[0]['country'] ) ) ? $info[0]['country'] : false;
}
}
$x = new Ip2Country();
var_dump( $x->get( 'canada.ca' ) );