Question

I have written simple code to determine country location using the suffix on the url eg. .cn, .se, .br etc.

Does anyone have any ideas or even if its possible to determine country or location using urls that end in .com or .net?

I was just reading up on something and found online apps that can determine location/country from the ip so how would I determine the ip or look it up using the url? can I do this in .net?

OK

So I have the following code and I get an exception when the url is invalid or faulty, can anyone help me to catch the error and add the url to another list and continue with my loop.

Public Sub getIpAddress(ByVal querylist As ArrayList)
        Dim IPList As New ArrayList
        Dim badList As New ArrayList
        Dim badHost As String
        Try
            For Each prod In querylist
                Dim ipEntry As IPHostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(prod)
                Dim IPAdd As IPAddress() = ipEntry.AddressList
                IPList.Add(IPAdd.ToString)
            Next
        Catch ex As Exception
            If ex.Message.Contains("No such host is known?") Then

            End If
        End Try

    End Sub

Answer 1

You could easily use an IP-to-country mapping file such as this to build a little tool to infer location from the IP. I would also supplement this with the TLD of country specific domains such as .co.uk and .co.nz.

You can get the IP from the host name in java using something like:

    InetAddress addr = InetAddress.getByName("www.bbc.co.uk");
    Long ipNum = ipToInt(addr.getHostAddress());

You’ll have to map to the equivalent in your language.