If you’re going to be doing a lot of Geotargeting or IP Address Lookups, please take a feed instead which will preserve both our bandwidth and your bandwidth.

Simple GET

That said, there is an easy HTTP oriented API to locate IP addresses and Geocode them. If you don’t supply the “?ip=aa.bb.cc.dd” bit, then the ip address lookup of the calling machine will be located instead (here, the aa,bb,cc,dd are decimal digits). If you add &position=true to the end of the URL then latitude and longitude will be returned also. Both HTML and XML formats are supplied for your convenience.

http://api.hostip.info/country.php
US

http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=12.215.42.19
Country: UNITED STATES (US)
City: Sugar Grove, IL

http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=12.215.42.19&position=true
Country: UNITED STATES (US)
City: Sugar Grove, IL
Latitude: 41.7696
Longitude: -88.4588

http://api.hostip.info/?ip=12.215.42.19
[use the URL above for an example - XML too long to paste below]

Country Flag

Paste the following code into your HTML to get a country flag of the ip address. The database is significantly more accurate (it ought to be 100%) for countries than for cities. It would be nice if y’all would make the flag a link to the www.hostip.info home page (http://www.hostip.info/) so they can come by if they’re interested – it’ll only benefit you in the long run. After all, the results get more accurate as more visitors submit their IP addresses!
Flag of visitor’s location:

<A HREF=”http://www.hostip.info”>
<IMG SRC=”http://api.hostip.info/flag.php” BORDER=”0″ ALT=”IP Address Lookup”>
</A>

Flag of any IP address:

<A HREF=”http://www.hostip.info”>
<IMG SRC=”http://api.hostip.info/flag.php?ip=12.215.42.19″ ALT=”IP Address Lookup”>
</A>

Embedded Applet

The following is designed to be embedded within another HTML page using the OBJECT tag. This will reproduce the zoom-in applet, (or an explanatory message with a link to fix, if the IP address lookup is unknown). Which means you can embed the applet in your own site without needing to have the local database and map data (which runs to a few gigabytes…)

All you need do is include the OBJECT block below in your HTML. Note, you can also add “?ip=aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd” to the frame.html url below to map a specific IP address.

<OBJECT DATA='http://www.hostip.info/map/frame.html'

  TYPE='text/html' BORDER=0

  WIDTH=610 HEIGHT=330 HSPACE=0 VSPACE=0>

</OBJECT>

*NIX Shell Script

You can use the following shell script to call in your favorite *NIX environment.

#!/bin/bash
lynx -dump “http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=$1″

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Posted on October 22nd, 2009 by Denie
Filed under: BASH, Linux, Scripting, Tutorials