Extracting IP address, webbrowser's description, country from a HTTP request

Question

I'm trying to develop a webapp that can extract the IP address, the webbrowser's description and the country of the enduser's request.

But I can't find how to deal that. How can I do this, please ?

Answer 1

This information is provided by javax.servlet.HttpServletRequest:

• IP address: request.getRemoteAddr()
• Web browser description (the "user agent"): request.getHeader("user-agent")

---

There is normally no country information, so you have to use a geolocation service together with the IP address.

For example http://freegeoip.net: Use an URL like

http://freegeoip.net/xml/www.stackoverflow.com

Other formats (CSV, JSON) are possible, it's described on their home page.

Possibly helpful:

• request.getHeader("accept-language"): Contains a list of languages (like "en", "de", "fr", ...)

---

Note: There is always the IP address, but request headers are optional.

Answer 2

There is quite a bit of info on this available. Much depends on what you are running on the server: How to get client's IP address using javascript only?, Getting a user country name from originating IP address with Ruby on Rails