awesome-robot

PHP Script to get user's location

This is a quick little function that uses cURL to scrape a third party website to get information about a users's location. I've noticed that the response may not always be very accurate, so I wouldn't recommend this for anything where the location actually matters. 

function location_information($ip_address) {
    #create an array of fields we will be searching for. This array is used later
    $fields = array ("Country","State/Province","City","Zip or postal code","Latitude","Longitude","Timezone","Local time","Hostname");
 
    #url of the site we'll be scraping
    $url = 'http://ipinfodb.com/ip_locator.php?ip=' . urlencode($ip_address);
 
    #initialize curl
    $ch = curl_init();
 
    #set array of curl options
    $curl_opt = array(
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION  => 1,
        CURLOPT_HEADER          => 0,
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER  => 1,
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT       => $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], #send the user's useragent, just in case they start blocking requests from servers
        CURLOPT_URL             => $url,
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT         => 1,
        CURLOPT_REFERER         => 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],
    );
    #set the options
    curl_setopt_array($ch, $curl_opt);
    #run curl, get content back in a string
    $content = curl_exec($ch);
    if (!is_null($curl_info)) {
        $curl_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
    }
 
    #close curl
    curl_close($ch);
 
    #loop through array of fields we're looking for, pull out corresponding values
    foreach($fields as $field) {
	iif ( preg_match("{<li>$field : ([^<]*)</li>}i", $content, $regs) )  {
            $location[$field] = $regs[1];
        }    
   }
}
    #return array of location information
    return $location;
}
 

Usage is as follows:

print_r(location_information($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']));