Question

I’m looking for a clear cut way to detect if a visitor is from the Middle East. If they are, I need to display a different header image (the current one has a hog in it, so it is frowned upon).

I can code the if then else for that, but I’m just looking for a simple function to detect. Here’s a function I used to get the country by IP:

function get_country_by_ip($ip){

    if(!$ip) return false;    # Missing parameter

    # Pull the XML
    $url = 'http://api.hostip.info/?ip='.$ip;
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($url);

    # Parse the data and store into array
    $citystate = explode(", ", $xml->children('gml', true)->featureMember->children()->Hostip->children('gml', true)->name);
    $result['city'] = $citystate[0];
    $result['state'] = $citystate[1];
    $result['country'] = $xml->children('gml', true)->featureMember->children()->Hostip->countryName;
    $result['country_abbr'] = $xml->children('gml', true)->featureMember->children()->Hostip->countryAbbrev;

    return (object) $result;

}

Can anyone help? Thanks.

Answer 1

You could define which countries fall into the “Middle East” group – by defining configurable array directly in the PHP file or in database and then check if the given country returned by your function is amongst the list of countries that belong to “Middle East”. By your example, something like this:

$middleEast = array(
 'Syria',
 'Iraq',
 ... // all the rest
);

$country = get_country_by_ip($ip);

if (in_array($country['country'], $middleEast) {
 echo 'Middle East!';
 exit;
}