Finally !!!!

I’ve got a new website, and on my personal domain ruturaj.net
Phew!!!

I shall be changing the look of it in a few week’s time.

This is not exactly a tutorial, but a small trick, to access ip-to-country.wehbosting.info demo as a web-service

ip-to-country.wehbosting.info does provide a nice CSV format of transferring IPs to country .. 🙂 Pretty amazing .
But the problem is you need to have a good dB support at your en to use it.

So for guys like me.. who can’t afford a dB have to rely on other ways, webservices etc…
But it seems that is not much in the line yet from those guys..
So I have written a mischiveous script that fakes a valid HTTP POST and gets back the country 😀

Since this script relies on their HTML page… It is highly likely that this script will fail and you need to modify it to make it working IF THEY CHANGE THE HTML.
Please don’t abuse the server… Its just for fun

<?php
$ip = $_GET['ip'];

function get_country($ip)
{
    $f = fsockopen('ip-to-country.webhosting.info', 80);
    if (!$f)
    {
        return false;
    }

    $postdata = "ip_address=".urlencode($ip)."&submit=".urlencode('Find Country');


    $request = '';
    $request .= "POST /node/view/36 HTTP/1.1\r\n";
    $request .= "Host: ip-to-country.webhosting.info\r\n";
    $request .= "User-Agent: Its me again\r\n";
    $request .= "Content-Length: ".strlen($postdata)."\r\n";
    $request .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
    $request .= "\r\n";
    $request .= "$postdata\r\n";
    
    fwrite($f, $request);
    $response = '';
    while (!feof($f)) 
    {
           $response .= fgets($f, 128);
    }

    $pos1 = strpos ( $response , '</from>');

    $pos2 = strpos ( $response , '<br><br><img' , $pos1 );

    $parse_from = substr( $response, $pos1+21, ($pos2-$pos1) );
    $pattern = "/<b>([^\/]*)<\/b>/si";
    preg_match_all($pattern, $parse_from, $matches);

    return $matches[1][1];
}

echo (get_country($ip));
 ?>
 

First display from where the RSS Feed is from …, ie display the site name, link etc.

echo ("<h5><a href='$link' title='$desc'>".$title."</a></h5>\n<br />".date('F d, Y H:i:s', $dt)."<p> </p>"); 

Now move throgh a for loop to finally display the XML in a well formatted HTML
Note here how I have used the div tag to position the content… You can adjust the [width], [left] style elements to suite your page.

echo ("<div style='position:absolute;left:5px;width:150px;font-size:8pt;font-family:trebuchet ms;border:1px dashed silver;padding:3px;'>");

for ($i=0; $i<count($arr['title']); $i++)
{
  echo ("<p>\n");
  echo ("<a href='".trim($arr['link'][$i])."'>".trim($arr['title'][$i])."</a><br />\n");
  echo (trim($arr['desc'][$i])."\n");
  echo ("</p>\n");
}
echo ("</div>");

OK now that we have all the content… We are ready to display it…
But before that we should check what way is the XML document structured…
For that paste the $url string in the browser and you’ll see something like this

<!-- Copyright (C) 2000-2004 - Developer Shed, Inc. -->
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Dev Shed - The Open Source Web Development Site</title>
    <link>http://www.devshed.com</link>
    <description>mos_rss</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <lastBuildDate>Tue, 27 Apr 2004 12:39:24 -0400</lastBuildDate>

      <item>
          <title>The Power of CSS</title>
          <link>
            http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Style-Sheets/The-Power-of-CSS/
          </link>
          <description>
            CSS or cascading style sheets are used to create a set of styles that can be applied to your fonts, ...
          </description>
      </item>
... and many more item tags...

IF you note carefully… The most important tag is the [item] tag, where there are sub tags [title], [link], [description], and these sub tags are at the level 4 The tags [title], [link], [description], [language], [lastBuildDate] which provide the general info of the website are at level 3

Now we just have to use the $vals array and get out the information, we do it using a simple for loop

for ($i=0; $i<count($vals); $i++)
{
	//get the primary info
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="TITLE" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$title = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="LINK" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$link = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="DESCRIPTION" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$desc = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="LASTBUILDDATE" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$dt = strtotime($vals[$i]['value']);
	}

	//get the main feed
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="TITLE" && $vals[$i]['level']==4) {
		$arr['title'][] = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="LINK" && $vals[$i]['level']==4) {
		$arr['link'][] = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="DESCRIPTION" && $vals[$i]['level']==4) {
		$arr['desc'][] = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
}

OK, Now we have all the required information only !

PHP has provided with a wonderful function file_get_contents

We first start with getting the xml feed into a string, by using file_get_contents

//the $url is the link from where XML is received
$url = 'http://devshed.com/index2.php?option=mos_rss&no_html=1'; 
$con = file_get_contents($url); //the contents are in the variable $con

//now create the SAX xml parser $xp = xml_parser_create();

Now using the function xml_parse_into_struct, we parse the xml and create 2 arrays $vals and $index, The $index contains all the info about the node nos. While the most important array is the $vals array

xml_parse_into_struct($xp, $con, $vals, $index);
// we now free the xml parser. xml_parser_free($xp);

If we print_r the $vals array we see something like this

Array
(
	[0] => Array
		(
			[tag] => RSS
			[type] => open
			[level] => 1
			[attributes] => Array
			    (
                    [VERSION] => 2.0
                )

            [value] => 

        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [tag] => CHANNEL
            [type] => open
            [level] => 2
            [value] => 
	
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [tag] => TITLE
            [type] => complete
            [level] => 3
            [value] => Dev Shed - The Open...
        )

		.....
		Something like this

These days there are many websites from which you you can publish their latest information on YOUR site, How ? The XML way.

Sites like Devshed.com, Devarticles.com, XML.com provide an XML format which you can use. But since the format is XML, it can’t be just shown directly, there has to be some sort of formatting done to it. XML-Stylesheet is one way and the other one, that I’ll be explaining to you is using PHP.

Commonly you can see an image like this for feed This is the link from where you can get the XML Feed, or syndicate its content