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Detect Location by IP

Returns "City, State" if found otherwise the default set at the top.

function detect_city($ip) {

        $default = 'UNKNOWN';

        if (!is_string($ip) || strlen($ip) < 1 || $ip == '127.0.0.1' || $ip == 'localhost')
            $ip = '8.8.8.8';

        $curlopt_useragent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)';

        $url = 'http://ipinfodb.com/ip_locator.php?ip=' . urlencode($ip);
        $ch = curl_init();

        $curl_opt = array(
            CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION  => 1,
            CURLOPT_HEADER      => 0,
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER  => 1,
            CURLOPT_USERAGENT   => $curlopt_useragent,
            CURLOPT_URL       => $url,
            CURLOPT_TIMEOUT         => 1,
            CURLOPT_REFERER         => 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],
        );

        curl_setopt_array($ch, $curl_opt);

        $content = curl_exec($ch);

        if (!is_null($curl_info)) {
            $curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
        }

        curl_close($ch);

        if ( preg_match('{<li>City : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs) )  {
            $city = $regs[1];
        }
        if ( preg_match('{<li>State/Province : ([^<]*)</li>}i', $content, $regs) )  {
            $state = $regs[1];
        }

        if( $city!='' && $state!='' ){
          $location = $city . ', ' . $state;
          return $location;
        }else{
          return $default;
        }

}

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  1. TeMc

    Note that this probably doesn’t scale very well as it’s depending on a third party service, and it depends on the html output from that service. Could break at any time and might slow down your page.

    (of course sanitize anything you get from here, assume nothing)

  2. Benjamin Knight

    Unfortunately the ipinfodb.com service isn’t terribly accurate… I’m in downtown San Francisco it thinks I’m in Santa Clara, CA. :(

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