Just a function to get geographical info about an IP.

I use this actually to stop spammers from certain countries…I know a bit to radical, but after using IP (of banned lists), captchas, akismet, banned names etc…I don’t know what else to do :S. (it seems is already working no spam in 1 week)

Usage:

$geoip=geoIP('81.60.189.183');//using an existing IP
$geoip=geoIP();//will use clients IP
 
print_r($geoip);
 
echo $geoip['country'];
echo $geoip['countryAb'];
echo $geoip['city'];
 
 if ($geoip['country']=='india')  die('country not allowed');//to ban a country

The code:

function get_tag($tag,$xml){
	preg_match_all('/<'.$tag.'>(.*)<\/'.$tag.'>$/imU',$xml,$match);
	return $match[1];
}
 
function valid_ip($ip){
	return ( ! preg_match( "/^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}$/", $ip)) ? FALSE : TRUE;
}
 
function geoIP($stringIp=-1){
 
    if (!valid_ip($stringIp)) $stringIp = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
 
    if ($_COOKIE['geoip']){
        $geoip=unserialize($_COOKIE['geoip']);        
        if ($geoip['ip']==$stringIp) return $geoip;//only return if IP is the same if not continue
    }
 
	$url='http://api.hostip.info/?ip='.$stringIp;// Making an API call to Hostip:
	$xml = file_get_contents($url);//echo $url;
 
	$city = get_tag('gml:name',$xml);
	$city = strtolower ($city[1]);
 
	$countryName = get_tag('countryName',$xml);
	$countryName = strtolower ($countryName[0]);
 
	$countryAbbrev = get_tag('countryAbbrev',$xml);
	$countryAbbrev = strtolower ($countryAbbrev[0]);
 
	$geoip['ip']=$stringIp;
	$geoip['city']=$city;
	$geoip['country']=$countryName;
	$geoip['countryAb']=$countryAbbrev;
 
	setcookie('geoip',serialize($geoip), time()+60*60*24*14);// Setting a cookie with the data, which is set to expire in 2 weeks:
	return $geoip;
}