PHP IP Address and City

[richkoi]

Is there a function in PHP to display a user's city, state and ip address?

How about Javascript?

Is there a way to create a function to bounce that information back to a database? (kind of how a stat counter would do?)

Thanks,

Rich

[jestep]

No way to do City or State unless you have an IP location database system. These are out there but they are so big that it is usually a very slow process.

Here's the value for the IP in php.

$REMOTE_ADDR

Something like this would put each visitor in a database.

$put_in_db = "INSERT INTO your_table (id, user_ip, date) VALUES ('', '$REMOTE_ADDR', NOW())";
$put_in_res = mysql_query($put_in_db);

This would not display any output, so if there was an error your page would still function properly.

[brian.mark]

We use http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country the free country version from here. City and state was a paid service that we didn't see the need for at the moment, but they have it available for you if you truly need it here: http://www.maxmind.com/app/city. Price was $20/50,000 queries, or you can buy the data for $370 plus $90/month for updates. The $20 for 50,000 seems better to me, especially if you cache the data and only query new IP's.

They have a php module available here: http://www.maxmind.com/app/php for the country piece. The data is updated for free monthly.

We're currently using the country code to weed out orders from the countries we don't accept orders from. Seems to catch almost all of them.

Brian.