How do you detect a website visitor's country (Specifically, US or not)?

BigDave_78642 0
Viewed 49407

I need to show different links for US and non-US visitors to my site. This is for convenience only, so I am not looking for a super-high degree of accuracy, and security or spoofing are not a concern.

I know there are geotargeting services and lists, but this seems like overkill since I only need to determine (roughly) if the person is in the US or not.

I was thinking about using JavaScript to get the user's timezone, but this appears to only give the offset, so users in Canada, Mexico, and South America would have the same value as people in the US.

Are there any other bits of information available either in JavaScript, or PHP, short of grabbing the IP address and doing a lookup, to determine this?

country country-codes timezone php javascript
8 Answers

There are some free services out there that let you make country and ip-based geolocalization from the client-side.

I've used the wipmania free JSONP service, it's really simple to use:

<script type="text/javascript">
  // plain JavaScript example
  function jsonpCallback(data) { 
    alert('Latitude: ' + data.latitude + 
          '\nLongitude: ' + data.longitude + 
          '\nCountry: ' + data.address.country); 
  }
</script>
<script src="http://api.wipmania.com/jsonp?callback=jsonpCallback"
        type="text/javascript"></script>

Or if you use a framework that supports JSONP, like jQuery you can:

// jQuery example
$.getJSON('http://api.wipmania.com/jsonp?callback=?', function (data) { 
  alert('Latitude: ' + data.latitude + 
        '\nLongitude: ' + data.longitude + 
        '\nCountry: ' + data.address.country); 
});

Check the above snippet running here.

CMS_54450

The best indicator is probably the HTTP Accept-Language header. It will look something like below in the HTTP request:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; MDDC; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.0.0; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: www.google.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

You should be able to retrieve this in PHP using the following:

<?php
echo $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'];
?>
user_1057440

I would say that geotargetting is the only method that's even remotely reliable. But there are also cases where it doesn't help at all. I keep getting to sites that think I'm in France because my company's backbone is there and all Internet traffic goes through it.

The HTTP Accept Header is not enough to determine the user locale. It only tells you what the user selected as their language, which may have nothing to do with where they are. More on this here.

Farinha_28410

My solution, easy and small, in this example i test Canada region from language fr-CA or en-CA

if( preg_match( "/^[a-z]{2}\-(ca)/i", $_SERVER[ "HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE" ] ) ){

   $region = "Canada";

}
user_23749970
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