I wanted to localize client side pricing for few countries without using any external API, so I used local Date object to fetch the country using new Date()).toString().split('(')[1].split(" ")[0]
document.write((new Date()).toString().split('(')[1].split(" ")[0])
Basically this small code snippet extracts the first word from the Date object. To check for various time zone, you can change the time of your local machine.
In my case, our service only included three countries, so I was able to get the location using the following code.
const countries = ["India", "Australia", "Singapore"]
const countryTimeZoneCodes = {
"IND": 0,
"IST": 0,
"AUS": 1,
"AES": 1,
"ACS": 1,
"AWS": 1,
"SGT": 2,
"SIN": 2,
"SST": 2
} // Probable three characters from timezone part of Date object
let index = 0
try {
const codeToCheck = (new Date()).toString().split('(')[1].split(" ")[0].toUpperCase().substring(0, 3)
index = countryTimeZoneCodes[codeToCheck]
} catch (e) {
document.write(e)
index = 0
}
document.write(countries[index])
This was just to improve user experience. It's not a full proof solution to detect location. As a fallback for not detecting correctly, I added a dropdown in the menubar for selecting the country.
Another solution:
You can look their IP address up in any IP-to-location service (like maxmind, ipregistry or ip2location). This will be accurate most of the time.
Here is a client-side example with Ipregistry:
fetch('https://api.ipregistry.co/?key=tryout')
.then(function (response) {
return response.json();
})
.then(function (payload) {
console.log(payload.location.country.name + ', ' + payload.location.city);
});
Top comments (1)
Worth adding IPGeolocation.io to that list of options too. Free tier gives 1,000 requests a day with no card, and it returns timezone and currency in the same response, handy if you're localizing pricing anyway instead of hardcoding a country list. Doesn't fully replace the fallback dropdown though, still worth keeping that for when a VPN or corporate proxy throws the lookup off.