IP Location

Introduction

I tried to find a very simple solution for getting the geo-location for a specific IP-address. Most of all, I wanted to avoid tricky string operations and complexity as shown in articles like this. So I use the XmlReader now and one of the web-services around.

Using the Code

This class does everything with a few lines:

using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace IpLocation
{
    public class Response
    {
        public string Ip, CountryCode, CountryName, RegionCode, 
        	RegionName, City, ZipCode, Latitude, Longitude;

        public Response()
        {
        }
        public static Response GetIpLocation(string IpAddress)
        {
            XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Response));
            XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(GetIpData(IpAddress)));
            return (Response)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
        }
        private static string GetIpData(string IpAddress)
        {
            var web = new WebClient() { Encoding = Encoding.UTF8 };
            return web.DownloadString(@"http://freegeoip.net/xml/" + IpAddress);
        }
    }
}

Then, based on this tiny class, you simply fill myLocation (X.X.X.X is the IP-address of the location you are looking for) and then use the properties of myLocation, e.g. CountryName, City and all the others: 

IpLocation.Response myLocation = IpLocation.Response.GetIpLocation("X.X.X.X");

Points of Interest

I like it, how XmlReader does everything needed here. This is the result you get from the URL-API:

I was really surprised how elegantly the XmlReader maps the XML-file with the name and the properties of a defined class, when you precisely use the same names in the class as there are in the XML-tags (see class above). In addition to that XmlReader's magic effectiveness the method DownloadString combined with the StringReader spare us all kinds of file-handling.  

History 

• 2013-12-08: Posted
• 2013-12-09: Explanation of XmlReader added.