[ale] Can I identify the country of origin?

[Jim]

On Wednesday 25 September 2002 11:05 am, Matt Smith wrote:
> If I'm not mistaken, Apache already has this functionality.  It's not based
> on the IP's country of origin, but the language settings of the browser
> which are sent with the request.
>
> If you've ever noticed the default homepage(s) that come with Apache,
> there's one for basically many languages, and apache will auto-select the
> page and display it automatically.  I'd provide a good link, but I can't
> get to apache.org right now for some reason. :/
>
> I would go down that path before trying to roll your own.  (Assuming you're
> using Apache, of course)
>
> If you're not using apache, you can analyze your server logs using
> webalizer and it does a rough estimation of country of origin - it even
> generates a pretty pie chart. :)
>
>
> --Matt

I am looking at my documentation for Apache now. There are three fields in the 
header being sent by the browser that relate to locale:

Accept-Language
Accept-Encoding
Accept-Charset

This can get complicated fast, due to the messy way we use ASCII to render 
non-Roman characters. For Russian--which I use often--Apache uses no less 
than seven different encodings. Some of these may also render Ukrainian and 
Byelorussian. But if you peg everything on,say, the Accept-Language header, 
that only tells you the user's preference, not the country 
he lives in.

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