How to get visitor's location (i.e. country) using geolocation?

Question

I'm trying to extend the native geolocation function

if(navigator.geolocation) {
    navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position) {
        var latitude = position.coords.latitude;
        var longitude = position.coords.longitude;
    });
}

so that I can use the visitor's country name (perhaps return an informative array).

So far all I've been able to find are functions that display a google maps interface but none actually gave what I want, except for this library which worked well in this example but for some reason didn't work on my computer. I'm not sure why that went wrong there.

Anyways, do you know how I can simply return an array containing information like country, city, etc. from latitude and longitude values?

Answer 1

You can use my service, http://ipinfo.io, for this. It will give you the client IP, hostname, geolocation information (city, region, country, area code, zip code etc) and network owner. Here's a simple example that logs the city and country:

$.get("https://ipinfo.io", function(response) {
    console.log(response.city, response.country);
}, "jsonp");

Here's a more detailed JSFiddle example that also prints out the full response information, so you can see all of the available details: http://jsfiddle.net/zK5FN/2/

The location will generally be less accurate than the native geolocation details, but it doesn't require any user permission.

Answer 2

You can do this natively wihtout relying on IP services. You can get the user's timezone like this:

Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone

and then extract the country from that value. Here is a working example on CodePen.

Answer 3

You don't need to locate the user if you only need their country. You can look their IP address up in any IP-to-location service (like maxmind, ipregistry or ip2location). This will be accurate most of the time.

Here is a client-side example with Ipregistry (disclaimer, I am working for):

fetch('https://api.ipregistry.co/?key=tryout')
    .then(function (response) {
        return response.json();
    })
    .then(function (payload) {
        console.log(payload.location.country.name + ', ' + payload.location.city);
    });

If you really need to get their location, you can get their lat/lng with that method, then query Google's or Yahoo's reverse geocoding service.

Answer 4

You can use your IP address to get your 'country', 'city', 'isp' etc...
Just use one of the web-services that provide you with a simple api like http://ip-api.com which provide you a JSON service at http://ip-api.com/json. Simple send a Ajax (or Xhr) request and then parse the JSON to get whatever data you need.

var requestUrl = "http://ip-api.com/json";

$.ajax({
  url: requestUrl,
  type: 'GET',
  success: function(json)
  {
    console.log("My country is: " + json.country);
  },
  error: function(err)
  {
    console.log("Request failed, error= " + err);
  }
});

Answer 5

See ipdata.co a service I built that is fast and has reliable performance thanks to having 10 global endpoints each able to handle >10,000 requests per second!

This answer uses a 'test' API Key that is very limited and only meant for testing a few calls. Signup for your own Free API Key and get up to 1500 requests daily for development.

This snippet will return the details of your current ip. To lookup other ip addresses, simply append the ip to the https://api.ipdata.co?api-key=test url eg.

https://api.ipdata.co/1.1.1.1?api-key=test

The API also provides an is_eu field indicating whether the user is in an EU country.

$.get("https://api.ipdata.co?api-key=test", function (response) {
    $("#response").html(JSON.stringify(response, null, 4));
}, "jsonp");

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<pre id="response"></pre>

Here's the fiddle; https://jsfiddle.net/ipdata/6wtf0q4g/922/

I also wrote this detailed analysis of 8 of the best IP Geolocation APIs.

Answer 6

A very easy to use service is provided by ws.geonames.org. Here's an example URL:

http://ws.geonames.org/countryCode?lat=43.7534932&lng=28.5743187&type=JSON

And here's some (jQuery) code which I've added to your code:

if (navigator.geolocation) {
    navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position) {
        $.getJSON('http://ws.geonames.org/countryCode', {
            lat: position.coords.latitude,
            lng: position.coords.longitude,
            type: 'JSON'
        }, function(result) {
            alert('Country: ' + result.countryName + '\n' + 'Code: ' + result.countryCode);
        });
    });
}​

Try it on jsfiddle.net ...

Answer 7

A free and easy to use service is provided at Webtechriser (click here to read the article) (called wipmania). This one is a JSONP service and requires plain javascript coding with HTML. It can also be used in JQuery. I modified the code a bit to change the output format and this is what I've used and found to be working: (it's the code of my HTML page)

<html>
    <body>
        <p id="loc"></p>


        <script type="text/javascript">
            var a = document.getElementById("loc");

               function jsonpCallback(data) { 
             a.innerHTML = "Latitude: " + data.latitude + 
                              "<br/>Longitude: " + data.longitude + 
                              "<br/>Country: " + data.address.country; 
              }
        </script>
        <script src="http://api.wipmania.com/jsonp?callback=jsonpCallback"
                     type="text/javascript"></script>


    </body>
</html>

PLEASE NOTE: This service gets the location of the visitor without prompting the visitor to choose whether to share their location, unlike the HTML 5 geolocation API (the code that you've written). Therefore, privacy is compromised. So, you should make judicial use of this service.

Answer 8

I wanted to localize client side pricing for few countries without using any external api, so I used local Date object to fetch the country using new Date()).toString().split('(')[1].split(" ")[0]

    document.write((new Date()).toString().split('(')[1].split(" ")[0])

Basically this small code snippet extracts the first word from Date object. To check for various time zone, you can change the time of your local machine.

In my case, our service only included three countries, so I was able to get the location using the following code.

const countries = ["India", "Australia", "Singapore"]
const countryTimeZoneCodes = {
  "IND": 0,
  "IST": 0,
  "AUS": 1,
  "AES": 1,
  "ACS": 1,
  "AWS": 1,
  "SGT": 2,
  "SIN": 2,
  "SST": 2
} // Probable three characters from timezone part of Date object
let index = 0
try {
  const codeToCheck = (new Date()).toString().split('(')[1].split(" ")[0].toUpperCase().substring(0, 3)
  index = countryTimeZoneCodes[codeToCheck]

} catch (e) {

  document.write(e)
  index = 0
}

document.write(countries[index])

This was just to improve user experience. It's not a full proof solution to detect location. As a fallback for not detecting correctly, I added a dropdown in the menubar for selecting the country.

Answer 9

You can simply import in your app.component.ts or whichever component you want to use

import { HttpClient } from '@angular/common/http';

Then make a simple GET request to http://ip-api.com/json

  getIPAddress() {
    this.http.get("http://ip-api.com/json").subscribe((res: any) => {
      console.log('res ', res);
    })
  }

You will get the following response by using it:

{
    "status": "success",
    "country": "country fullname here",
    "countryCode": "country shortname here",
    "region": "region shortname here",
    "regionName": "region fullname here",
    "city": "city fullname here",
    "zip": "zipcode will be in string",
    "lat": "latitude here will be in integer",
    "lon": "logitude here will be in integer",
    "timezone": "timezone here",
    "isp": "internet service provider name here",
    "org": "internet service provider organization name here",
    "as": "internet service provider name with some code here",
    "query": "ip address here"
}

Answer 10

For developers looking for a full-featured geolocation utility, you can have a look at geolocator.js (I'm the author).

Example below will first try HTML5 Geolocation API to obtain the exact coordinates. If fails or rejected, it will fallback to Geo-IP look-up. Once it gets the coordinates, it will reverse-geocode the coordinates into an address.

var options = {
    enableHighAccuracy: true,
    timeout: 6000,
    maximumAge: 0,
    desiredAccuracy: 30,
    fallbackToIP: true, // if HTML5 geolocation fails or rejected
    addressLookup: true, // get detailed address information
    timezone: true, 
    map: "my-map" // this will even create a map for you
};

geolocator.locate(options, function (err, location) {
    console.log(err || location);
});

It supports geo-location (via HTML5 or IP lookups), geocoding, address look-ups (reverse geocoding), distance & durations, timezone information and more...

Answer 11

You can use ip-api.io to get visitor's location. It supports IPv6.

As a bonus it allows to check whether ip address is a tor node, public proxy or spammer.

JavaScript Code:

function getIPDetails() {
    var ipAddress = document.getElementById("txtIP").value;

    var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhttp.onreadystatechange = function () {
        if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status == 200) {
            console.log(JSON.parse(xhttp.responseText));
        }
    };
    xhttp.open("GET", "http://ip-api.io/json/" + ipAddress, true);
    xhttp.send();
}

<input type="text" id="txtIP" placeholder="Enter the ip address" />
<button onclick="getIPDetails()">Get IP Details</button>

jQuery Code:

$(document).ready(function () {
        $('#btnGetIpDetail').click(function () {
            if ($('#txtIP').val() == '') {
                alert('IP address is reqired');
                return false;
            }
            $.getJSON("http://ip-api.io/json/" + $('#txtIP').val(),
                 function (result) {
                     alert('Country Name: ' + result.country_name)
                     console.log(result);
                 });
        });
    });

<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.4.js"></script>
<div>
    <input type="text" id="txtIP" />
    <button id="btnGetIpDetail">Get Location of IP</button>
</div>

Answer 12

If you don't want to use an api and only the country is enough for you, you can use topojson and worldatlas.

import { feature } from "https://cdn.skypack.dev/topojson@3.0.2";
import { geoContains, geoCentroid, geoDistance } from "https://cdn.skypack.dev/d3@7.0.0";

async function success(position) {
    const topology = await fetch("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/world-atlas@2/countries-50m.json").then(response => response.json());
    const geojson = feature(topology, topology.objects.countries);
    
    const {
        longitude,
        latitude,
    } = position.coords;
    
    const location = geojson.features
        .filter(d => geoContains(d, [longitude, latitude]))
        .shift();
    
    if (location) {
        document.querySelector('#location').innerHTML = `You are in <u>${location.properties.name}</u>`;
    }
    
    if (!location) {
        const closestCountry = geojson.features
            // You could improve the distance calculation so that you get a more accurate result
            .map(d => ({ ...d, distance: geoDistance(geoCentroid(d), [longitude, latitude]) }))
            .sort((a, b) => a.distance - b.distance)
            .splice(0, 5);
        
        if (closestCountry.length > 0) {
            const possibleLocations = closestCountry.map(d => d.properties.name);
            const suggestLoctions = `${possibleLocations.slice(0, -1).join(', ')} or ${possibleLocations.slice(-1)}`;
            
            document.querySelector('#location').innerHTML = `It's not clear where you are!<section>Looks like you are in ${suggestLoctions}</section>`;
        }
        
        if (closestCountry.length === 0) {
            error();
        }        
    }
}

function error() {
    document.querySelector('#location').innerHTML = 'Sorry, I could not locate you';
};

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(success, error);

This code takes longitude and latitude and checks if this point is included in one of the geojson's feature (a spatially bounded entity). I created also a working example.