Geo Location extracted from visitors ip address

Question

Is there a way to extract out of some environmental variable the Geo location of the user being the city the user visits out website from? Perhaps by utilizing his originated ip address?

Answer 1

Yep. You can get an 11MB database (17MB uncompressed)

http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/downloadable/

which you can use to either populate an existing database with the .CSV data there, or use the binary data blob in concert with the Python API (assume if u are using Python)

https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-python # Python + C
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pygeoip/ # pure Python

Just be sure to adhere to the licensing terms.

Answer 2

It is possible to look up the geographic region associated with a block of IP addresses. That does not necessarily bear any resemblence to the actual location of the user. It tells you the location of the Internet provider that registered the IP addresses.