Question

I have this code, which basically looks up an IP address when a user hits the http://domain.tld/stats/1.gif and uses the geoip-lite library to return lat and long on a raphael map.

    var http = require('http'),
    util  = require('util'),
    static = require('node-static'),
    faye = require('faye'),
    url = require('url'),
    geoip = require('geoip-lite');

    function LiveStats(options) {
    if (! (this instanceof arguments.callee)) {
      return new arguments.callee(arguments);
    }

    ...

  } else if (location.pathname == '/stats/1.gif' && request.method == 'GET') {
        var origin;
        response.writeHead(200, {
              'Content-Type': 'image/gif'
        });
        origin = /\/(.*)\.gif/.exec(request.url);
        if (origin) {
        var ip = request.connection.remoteAddress;
        var geo = geoip.lookup(ip);
        console.log(geo);
        self.bayeux.getClient().publish('/stat', {
                 title: 'user'
               , latitude: geo.ll[0]
               , longitude: geo.ll[1]
               , ip: ip
             });
            }
            response.end("OK");
 } else {
        file.serve(request, response);
      }
    });
  });
  return server;
};

module.exports = LiveStats;

console.log(geo);

returns for example:

{ range: [ 1391911936, 1391915007 ],
  country: 'FR',
  region: 'A9',
  city: 'N?mes',
  ll: [ 43.8333, 4.35 ] }

where the city formatting is all wrong, how should i correct this, so that it prints Nîmes

Answer 1

I tried your IP address with geoip-lite, and as you say, 8-bit characters don’t seem to work. I have had great luck using geoip, which not only handles wide characters, but it seems to have higher resolution, too. I suggest you try that out, if you can’t fix this.

UPDATE: Using geoip. First you have to download GeoLiteCity.dat from Maxmind.

var City = require("geoip").City,
    city = new City(__dirname + "/GeoLiteCity.dat");

city.lookup("82.246.239.255", function(err, location) {
    console.log(location);
}

Gives me:

{ country_code: 'FR',
  country_code3: 'FRA',
  country_name: 'France',
  region: 'A9',
  city: 'Nîmes',
  latitude: 43.83330154418945,
  longitude: 4.349999904632568,
  continent_code: 'EU' }