[thelist] Country by IP address

[William Anderson]

Tony Crockford wrote:
> At 12:44 on Tuesday, 15 Jun 2004, Andy Budd wrote:
> 
>> Any suggestions would be welcome
> 
> Couldn't you use getenv [1] and  gethostbyaddr [2] to get the hostname 
> and  then parse_url[3] to get .com or .co.uk?

If you did, you'd get false or bodged results.  Not every IP address has a 
reverse DNS entry for it, and not every IP address with one has an 
*accurate* one.  A reverse DNS entry for an IP can be anything - it doesn't 
even have to resolve to something real.  I could run my website in the 
States or Canada or India and still have the IP for wherever it is return 
neuro.me.uk - that wouldn't do your plan much good, would it? :)

Also, gTLDs are global, so finding out that an IP address is supposedly 
something.gribble.example.com is meaningless from a geographic perspective. 
  Another example is AOL - if you use AOL in the UK, you appear to come from 
aol.com - busted :)

Using geographic IP services such as GeoIP is the way to go.

- http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country

-- 
_ __/|  William Anderson      | Brodie: The Force is strong with this one
\`O_o'  neuro at well dot com |    Jay: Dude, don't encourage him
=(_ _)= http://neuro.me.uk/   |  -- Mallrats, (1995)
    U  - Thhbt! GPG 0xFA5F1100 |