Finding Longitude & Latitude based on IP

Fri 12 December 2014

Filed under Python

Once I had the IP, I needed to find the longitude & latitude coordinates

On that recent project I was working on, I was looking for the local weather based on where the user is located. So first, I got the IP. With that IP, I used pygeoip.GeoIP to find the longitude and latitude coordinates. Later, I will use those coordinates to find the local weather.

First, I downloaded the GeoIP data from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pygeoip/ and unzipped it. And saved the GeoLiteCity.dat on my local server. '/path/GeoLiteCity.dat'.

I also had to pip install pygeoip.

Here's the code:

import pygeoip   

geoip_data = pygeoip.GeoIP('/path/GeoLiteCity.dat')

def find_lat_lng(ip):
        data = geoip_data.record_by_addr(ip)
        lat = data['latitude']
        lng = data['longitude']
        return lat, lng

data: In this case, I used the record_by_addr(addr) attribute since I had the addr, the IP. And I want the full record.
There are many other attributes you can use with this geoip data. Checkout more at: http://pygeoip.readthedocs.org/en/v0.3.2/api-reference.html

data is a dictionary. And I called the latitude and longitude keys of data to find the values of lat and lng.

With the lat and lng, I will be able to get the weather for those coordinates. Using forecast_io. More on that next time.