How to use ip start & ip end to find out location

Question

type    ip_start    ip_end          country     state       city

ipv4    0.0.0.0     0255.255.255    US          California  Los Angeles
ipv4    1.0.0.0     1.0.0.255       AU          Queensland  Brisbane

I have a table contain ip list for country, state and city.

My question is how can I detect user's ip location from my db

If I use php $ip = $_SERVER["HTTP_CLIENT_IP"]; , HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR & REMOTE_ADDR $ip = $_SERVER["HTTP_CLIENT_IP"]; , HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR & REMOTE_ADDR to find out user's ip.

How can I use this variable to find out which country, state & city from my db?

How ip_start & ip_end work?

ex. if my ip is $ip=123.243.51.83;

How can I use this $ip to find out location from my database?

Answer 1

IP addresses can be converted to numbers. You can use this to find out which range the ip is in.

Using MySQL and INET_ATON :

SELECT country FROM table WHERE 
INET_ATON("123.243.51.83") BETWEEN INET_ATON(ip_start) AND INET_ATON(ip_end);

Using PHP and ip2long :

$yourIpLong = ip2long($yourIp);
if($yourIpLong > ip2long($ipStart) && $yourIpLong < ip2long($ipEnd)){
     //IP is in range $ipStart -> $ipEnd
}else{
    //IP is not in range.
}

Note that both these solutions are for IPv4.

Answer 2

It would be better if you store the IP addresses in an integer representation. You can use the MySql function INET_ATON for that.

In PHP you can calculate it with:

$address = '174.36.207.186';

$addressArray = explode('.', $address);

$integerIp =   ( 16777216 * $addressArray[0] )
             + (    65536 * $addressArray[1] )
             + (      256 * $addressArray[2] )
             +              $addressArray[3];

The query (if you have stored it as integer in DB ) would be:

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE
".$integerIp." BETWEEN ip_start AND ip_end
LIMIT 1

You also can do the coversion directly in the DB like Jim answered but why let the DB do the calculation if you can precompute it?