Detect/estimate country of a http-request in ASP.NET

I’m looking for ways to detect/estimate the country from which a http-request is coming in ASP.NET.
I know there are some solutions with services/country lookups but I never used one.

I’m looking for small/clean solutions.
It’s for helping someone filling out a form so it does not have to be 100% accurate.

Thanks in advance..

Answers:

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Method 1

You can make a simple HTTP request to this URL:

http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=207.46.197.32

using the value of the REMOTE_ADDR server variable. That will return the country and city like this:

Country: UNITED STATES (US)
City: New York, NY

I use that service for a web form just as you describe. Occasionally it doesn’t know the answer, but usually it’s very good (and it’s free and simple 😎

In C#, you can use System.Net.WebRequest.Create to read from the URL.

Method 2

You can use one of available web services to match an incoming request to a country.

Otherwise you may decide to grab the MaxMind database file (GeoLite Country), read from this file in your application and perform a match. Thus you will be independent from a third-party service, only pulling regularly updates for the database file.

Also check out similar questions:

Geolocation web service recommendations

Know a good IP address Geolocation Service?

Method 3

If you choose to use the REMOTE_ADDR server variable, you can be fairly certain that the IP that you recover accurately represents the nation of origin of that user. It is fairly uncommon for a user to be accessing the Internet from outside of the country that he is currently in, with a few notable exceptions, such as those who choose to surf though an anonymous proxy server, such as is discussed below. If, however, you want to get the state that a user is coming from, or authenticate the identity of a user, you’re out of luck as far as any even remotely reliable method is concerned.

More info here.

Method 4

I just had to do this so here’s a working example (specific to France) which may be of use to someone:

        string userIP = Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"];
        string localeAPIURL = "http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=" + userIP;

        HttpWebRequest r = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(localeAPIURL);
        r.Method = "Get";
        HttpWebResponse res = (HttpWebResponse)r.GetResponse();
        Stream sr = res.GetResponseStream();
        StreamReader sre = new StreamReader(sr);

        // check response for FRANCE
        string s = sre.ReadToEnd();
        string sub = s.Substring(9, 6);
        if (sub == "FRANCE")
        {
            Response.Redirect("http://fr.mysite.com");
        }

Method 5

This is what I’ve used:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $.ajax({
            'url': 'http://www.freegeoip.net/json/@(HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress)',
            'type': 'GET',
            'success': function(data) {
                // for example
                if (data.country_code === "GB") {
                    ... further logic here
                }
            }
        });
    });
</script>

Simple, and it works.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0