Building Sample Programs for an IP-to-country Mapping Application

Introduction

Building a web site that will be seated on a multi-lingual platform often requires developing an IP-to-country application that permits you to map users' IP addresses to their corresponding countries. Thus, if you're interested in learning how to create an application like this, which can be easily incorporated into any existing web site, then this series of articles might be what you're looking for.

Of course, if you already read the initial chapter of this series, then you're already familiar with creating the basic structure of the aforementioned IP-mapping program. In that tutorial I explained how to create a lookup MySQL table by importing the contents of the IP-to-country database, available for free at Webnet77.

This database contains over 82,0000 records and allows you to map more than 3,200,000 IP addresses to their respective countries. This can be really handy for developing different IP-to-country applications with minor efforts.

Since I already discussed how to create a mapping MySQL table by using the lookup database, in this second article I'm going to appeal to the functionality of this table to build a couple of sample PHP applications. These applications will be capable of determining from which country visitors are accessing a web page, in accordance with their IP addresses.

Now, it's time to get rid of the preliminaries and start developing these simple -- yet efficient -- IP-to-country programs with PHP. Let's jump in!