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

Question

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?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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'];
?>

Solution 3

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.

Solution 4

Wipmania.com & PHP

<?php
$site_name = "www.your-site-name.com";

function getUserCountry() {
    $fp = fsockopen("api.wipmania.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 5);
    if (!$fp) {
        // API is currently down, return as "Unknown" :(
        return "XX";
    } else {
        $out = "GET /".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."?".$site_name." HTTP/1.1\r\n";
        $out .= "Host: api.wipmania.com\r\n";
        $out .= "Typ: php\r\n";
        $out .= "Ver: 1.0\r\n";
        $out .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
        fwrite($fp, $out);
        while (!feof($fp)) {
            $country = fgets($fp, 3);
        }
        fclose($fp);
        return $country;
    }
}
?>

Solution 5

Simply we can use Hostip API

<?php $country_code = file_get_contents("http://api.hostip.info/country.php"); <br/>if($country_code == "US"){ echo "You Are USA"; } <br/>else{ echo "You Are Not USA";} ?>

All Country codes are here.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

View more solutions

Comments

[FrustratedWithFormsDesigner]

What determines Accept-Language? Is it set by the OS, or can the user influence it? If my co-worker sets up his laptop to use Chinese, what would the Accept-Language be? Also, what about en-gb?

[Taylor Leese]

It's determined by the user's browser settings.

[Mark]

@FrustratedWithFormsDesigner: The accept language is determined by the browser. It can be manipulated by the user if they choose to. For example, under firefox, go to Preferences > Content > Languages

[JB King]

It is set by the browser, usually initialized from the OS. Thus, while I am in Canada, I can appear to be in the US, UK, or somewhere else by setting the "Language" as it is usually called in browsers like IE and FF.

[FrustratedWithFormsDesigner]

@all: This suggests that an IP-based solution is far more reliable.

[Taylor Leese]

It's not a perfect solution. You would be making an educated guess based on the header. If this is not sufficient you'd have to look into IP-based location services. Note, the OP said, "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."

[Pekka]

@FrustratedWithFormsDesigner: Absolutely. Still, en-us is a pretty good pointer.

[wwalford]

Guys, Taylor in particular, this looks like it might be the solution I need. As I said, I don't care if the user fakes being from somewhere else, as they are certainly welcome to do so. I'm going to give it some time to see if I get any other good options, but thank you!

[FrustratedWithFormsDesigner]

@BigDave: I'm curious now: why is it OK for your results to be so approximate?

[shen]

Given how easy it would be to implement CMS answer, im not sure why using the HTTP header is preferred. There are free geolocating libraries so this is definately the way to go. They are quite accurate for western countries.

[Admin]

How could your code be modified so that instead of an alert dialog there is URL redirect that takes a US visitor to a .COM address & allows a Canadian visitor passes through normally? (For a .CA version of a website with a sister .COM version site)

[shen]

switch statement in the onload event, check the "country" returned from the json function then call Server.Transfer or similiar.

[Mujahid]

Thanks a lot for the code and the link, its working and awesome :)

[user782104]

it is server side? so it is checking the server location instead of the cilent?

[Brian Leishman]

This doesn't support https :(

[Gerard]

I usually use geo-ip.net/locate?query=stackoverflow.com&format=json it supports ssl connections

[BrightIntelDusk]

This won't work in a lot of cases where countries have a shared time zone.