User Location (country) 2

[Fendal]

Hello All,

Is it possible to get a users location with asp, so that I could display a flag of the users country in the top right of the browser depending on there location ?, If anyone could link me to the right direction or give sample code that would be great, Thanks For reading.

 

[Tarwn]

The only method I am sure about for that si to use the remote user IP address and look it up in a country/IP cross-reference table. There area bunch of these out tere, some for sale and a few for few. Best bet would be to use google to find that data.
Once you have that data it will only be necessary to get the users IP address, which you can do in a single call like so:

userIp = Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_HOST")

Now, if the user is going through a proxy server or is VLAN'd, you might get bad results since you would be reporting based on the IP address of their proxy or VLAN ip address, but for the majority of the time this method ought to work.

 

[Fendal]

o.k Tarwn, Thanks, thats food for thought.

 

[Tarwn]

I apologize for my lack of spell checking on that one, hope it wasn't too confusing. Sorry i couldn't be more specific on where to look for lookup data. You may wantto try the search button above, I seem to recall answering a similar question a couple years ago and some of the links that were posted in that solution may still be valid.

 

[Fendal]

No need to apologize I understood completely, Thanks again.

 

[damber]

e.g.:

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

http://www.web-heaven.com/

http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info

http://www.ip2location.com

They code the IP in decimal so you need to convert the incoming IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx into a decimal xxxxxxxxxxxxx - you do this in this way:

1. Validate the correct format has been given
2. Split the IP into an array
3. Then multiply out each number by the relevant power of 256 and add them together - e.g:
aIP(0) * 256 * 256 * 256 +
aIP(1) * 256 * 256 +
aIP(2) * 256 +
aIP(3)

Then use that to lookup the value from the DB.

The second link in that list includes flags for the countries and also general info about the country - e.g. currency, population etc.

With all the free databases it is not 100% accurate (even many paid for databases are just shy of 100% accuracy) - so be cautious what you use it for.

Hope that helps.

A smile is worth a thousand kind words. So smile, it's easy!

 

[Fendal]

Thanks alot, Damber