How to get the Country according to a certain IP?

Question

Does anyone know of a simple way to retrieve the country for a given IP Address? Preferably in ISO_3166-1 format?

Answer 1

I don't know how accurate that hostip.info site is. I just visted that site, and it reported that my country is Canada. I'm in the US and the ISP that my office uses only operates from the US. It does allow you to correct it's guess, but if you are using this service to track web site vistors by country, you'll have no way of knowing if the data is correct. Of course, I'm just one data point. I downloaded the GeoLite Country database, which is just a .csv file, and my IP address was correctly identified as US.

Another benefit of the MaxMind product line (paid or free) is that you have the data, you don't incur the performance hit of making a web service call to another system.

Answer 2

You can use the solution provided for this question.

But it returns a 2 digit country code.