Get country location of an IP with native PHP

Question

Read on before you say this is a duplicate, it\'s not. (as far as I could see)

I want to get the county code in php from the client.

Yes I know you can do th

Answer 1

Here's a few:

• http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=174.31.162.48&position=true
• http://geoiplookup.net/geoapi.php?output=json&ipaddress=174.31.162.48
• http://ip-api.com/json/174.31.162.48?callback=yourfunction
• http://ipinfo.io/174.31.162.48

All return slightly different results.

Answer 2

Consider ipcountryphp (my site, my code, my honour) as it provides a local internet-lifetime freely updated database. It's fast and fully self-contained, pluggable into anything PHP 5.3, SQLite3 and beyond. Very fast seeks and no performance penalties.

Enough with shameless self-promotion, let's get serious:

Relying on querying remote services in real-time to get visitor country can become a major bottleneck for your site's functionality depending on the response speed of the queried server. As a rule of thumb you should never query external services for real-time site functionality (like page loading). Using APIs in the background is great but when you need to query the country of each visitor before the page is rendered, you open yourself up to a world of pain. And do keep in mind you're not the only one abusing free services :)

So queries to 3rd-party services stay in the background while only local functionality that relies on no 3rd-party go into the layers there users interact with. Just my slightly performance paranoid take on this :)

PS: Above mentioned script I wrote has IPv6 support too.