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Sometimes you need to know which country your site visitors are coming from - such as if you are planning to run a geographically targeted advertising program. This article will introduce this method.
Sometimes you need to know which country your site visitors are coming from - such as if you are planning to run a geographically targeted advertising program. This is where tools like MaxMinds GeoIP come in - it allows you to easily obtain the exact geolocation of your visitors from their IP address.
MaxMind provides commercial databases and free databases. The former is more accurate and can reach the level of city information where the user is located, while the latter can only determine the country and region. In this article, we will demonstrate how to use the free version. If you need more detailed information, such as the city and country information of remote customers, you need to purchase a more detailed database from MaxMind: http://www.maxmind.com.
Getting Started
To use this software, you must first download the GeoIP free country information file: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country and store it in a directory on the Web server. Then you need to select the language API used by the database file. To simplify the entire process, we will use a pure PHP version to avoid any additional configuration or setup of Apache components. Please remember to read the software license terms before installing the software to the website: http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/LICENSE.txt to make sure you agree to these terms.
Code List A
// include functions
include("geoip.inc");
// read GeoIP database
$handle = geoip_open("GeoIP. dat", GEOIP_STANDARD);
// map IP to country
echo "IP address 62.149.130.132 located in " . geoip_country_name_by_addr($handle, "62.149.130.132") . " (country code " . geoip_country_code_by_addr($ handle, "62.149.130.132") . ")";