How to detect country / location of visitor?

php javascript geolocation location
Lupo picture Lupo · Nov 14, 2010 · Viewed 74.9k times · Source

Possible Duplicate:
Location detecting techniques for IP addresses

For our website it's important to know from exactly which country our visitor is coming from.

I guess the best answer for my question would be the simple geo location feature of current browser systems, which just ask the user if the website is allowed to see his geographic location: http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

but I don't want to bother visitor with questions, I would love to automatically detects the visitor's location (country should be enough.)

What's the best way to do this? - what ip database would be the best? - is the browser header trustable enough to detect his country? (en-us en-en en-ca?) What's the best solution?

Answer

Andy picture Andy · Nov 14, 2010

NetImpact provide a free API for geolocation lookup by IP, ProgrammableWeb also has a roundup of GeoIP lookup providers. This involves a small amount of latency while your application completes an API call (unless your application can use a non-blocking call) but is the least intrusive manner of detecting a visitor's country of origin.

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