Question

I am trying to use hostip in order to save to DB user’s general area/ location, according to IP address. However I am not sure how to parse the data from the output I am receiving.

    <?php
        $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
        $data = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=$ip")); //<-not sure how
        $country = $data['Country'];
        $city = $data['City']; 
    ?>

You can see here how I am receiving the data:
http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=00.0.00.00

Another option was to use the first answer here (using ipinfodb): Getting location details from IP in PHP, but it doesn’t even display any data, even when I try inserting my IP in the url, let alone parse the results, so I changed to the above.

Answer 1

So, according to ipinfodb, you will have to sign up for an API key. But they have an API class, which’s getCountry($host) will get the country of the IP after you gave the protected $apiKey = ''; your API key. Or if you don’t want to use that, you can use their XML or their JSON API.

UPDATE 1

Or, if that is too hard for you, then use explode on the newline separator (\n) at the other service. Or, perhaps use another service.

UPDATE 2

Seems that geoPlugin, mentioned in the question you linked does not require an API key. Their code to use is echo var_export(unserialize(file_get_contents('http://www.geoplugin.net/php.gp?ip='.$ip)));.