Match An IP Address To A Physical Location With PHP
Sometimes it’s useful to locate where a certain IP address is located. Usually this isn’t really that accurate but at least it gives you a general idea for stats or marketing research. I’ve written a simple php function that uses curl to query a IP address location database for the location info. In the function I specify that I want a JSON data structure containing the location information. I chose JSON over the XML alternative just for ease of use. The object that we get returned needs to be referenced in a specific kind of way. I show how under the function.
This function uses the IPInfoDB JSON php API. There are quite a few alternatives out there so feel free to do your research. The IPInfoDB PHP API returns :
- Country Code (CA or US)
- Country Name (Canada)
- Region Code
- Region Name (Province or Dtate)
- City
- Postalcode or Zip Code (which doesn’t always work)
- Latitude
- Longitude
- gmt offset
- Dst offset
function get_location_info($ip_address)
{
$url = 'http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=';
$url .= $ip_address;
$url .= '&output=json';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$json_packet = curl_exec($ch);
$location_array = json_decode($json_packet);
curl_close($ch);
return($location_array);
}//get_location_info
$loc_arr = get_location_info("69.157.107.64");
echo "\n";
echo $loc_arr->{'City'};
echo "\n";
echo $loc_arr->{'RegionName'};
echo "\n";
echo $loc_arr->{'CountryCode'};
Hopefully theres no confusion there.
