Geo Location based on IP Address - PHP

Question

We're looking for a fast and accurate way to get the visitors location based on their IP.

We have tried ipinfodb.com but their API made our website severely lag when making the API call.

What other services do you suggest?

Answer 1

Get Geo-IP Information

Requests a geo-IP-server (netip.de) to check, returns where an IP is located (host, state, country, town).

<?php
       $ip='94.219.40.96';
       print_r(geoCheckIP($ip));
       //Array ( [domain] => dslb-094-219-040-096.pools.arcor-ip.net [country] => DE - Germany [state] => Hessen [town] => Erzhausen )

       //Get an array with geoip-infodata
       function geoCheckIP($ip)
       {
               //check, if the provided ip is valid
               if(!filter_var($ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP))
               {
                       throw new InvalidArgumentException("IP is not valid");
               }

               //contact ip-server
               $response=@file_get_contents('http://www.netip.de/search?query='.$ip);
               if (empty($response))
               {
                       throw new InvalidArgumentException("Error contacting Geo-IP-Server");
               }

               //Array containing all regex-patterns necessary to extract ip-geoinfo from page
               $patterns=array();
               $patterns["domain"] = '#Domain: (.*?)&nbsp;#i';
               $patterns["country"] = '#Country: (.*?)&nbsp;#i';
               $patterns["state"] = '#State/Region: (.*?)<br#i';
               $patterns["town"] = '#City: (.*?)<br#i';

               //Array where results will be stored
               $ipInfo=array();

               //check response from ipserver for above patterns
               foreach ($patterns as $key => $pattern)
               {
                       //store the result in array
                       $ipInfo[$key] = preg_match($pattern,$response,$value) && !empty($value[1]) ? $value[1] : 'not found';
               }

               return $ipInfo;
       }

?>