IP to Country [C++]

[BlowMe]

A little while ago I decided to make an program that would trace an IP to the country it originated from. After finding a CSV file of IP Number ranges and their corresponding countries I got to work, with out much luck. After talking to TomB about it for a while, he decided to give me a pretty in-depth (at least for me) tutorial on aspects of C and C++ like linked lists and text phrasing.

The result of this tutorial is this app: Download Source Code

sorry about the lack of comments, everything I need is in chat logs. Its not too hard to work out though.

The code isn't really mine, so as far as I am concerned do as you will unless TomB says otherwise.

[metatron]

http://www.maxmind.com/app/api

[arran]

I recently compiled the code in Dev-C++. Execution was fine up until EmptyLinkedList(list); which causes the error "ip2na.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience... blah blah blah" Removing the call to EmptyLinkedList solves the problem, however this isn't really a solution. Anyway I have made two changes to the original code.

Firstly instead of prompting for an IP Address I have passed it as an argument and retrieved it from char** argv so on the command line you can do: ip2na w.x.y.z

Secondly when doing something like C:Documents and SettingsArran>G:ip2na.exe w.x.y.z it trys to open ip-to-country.txt in C:Documents and SettingsArran when its actually in G:. I have therefore added code to get the path of ip2na.exe from argv[0] and store it in char path[MAX_LENGTH] to which I strcat(path, "ip-to-country.txt").

One last thing, the size of ip-to-country.txt is quite large, one way of making it smaller would be storing the IP addresses as four bytes and not a string of digits. For example storing 33996344 as ASCII uses 8 bytes whereas it could be stored as 4 bytes as 2, 6, 190 and 56.

The modified source code can be found at http://websiteat.googlepages.com/ip2na.zip

[BlowMe]

Thanks for adding the command line argument, that makes it a lot nicer.

I never got a problem with EmptyLinkedList() when I compiled with minGW on windows, or gcc on linux but I'll take another look. I know ip-to-country.txt is pretty big, but since I already had it in an (almost) usable format (TomB had to make some changes) I thought I would just use it.

Basically like I said, this application was made purely for learning purposes, but thanks for the changes, you taught me some stuff.

[jollyrancher82]

Unfortunately, there is a buffer overflow in your code at this point:

strcpy(path, argv[0]);

It is fixed by doing:

strncpy(path, argv[0], MAX_PATH);

[BlowMe]

Unfortunately, there is a buffer overflow in your code at this point:

strcpy(path, argv[0]);

It is fixed by doing:

strncpy(path, argv[0], MAX_PATH);

Is this in th original code you did? or arrans modification?

[jollyrancher82]

the modified code.

[arran]

Unfortunately, there is a buffer overflow in your code at this point:

strcpy(path, argv[0]);

It is fixed by doing:

strncpy(path, argv[0], MAX_PATH);

Yes it was my modified code that introduced the buffer overflow, anyway thanks for pointing that out.

[davil]

This is a cool app... sorry I can't help with the C++ but if you get a chance a link to that CSV file would be nice. I'd like to write my own app in PHP maybe.

actually I just did a quick google and found one here:

http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/

thanks anyway. keep up the good work.

[BlowMe]

This is a cool app... sorry I can't help with the C++ but if you get a chance a link to that CSV file would be nice. I'd like to write my own app in PHP maybe.

actually I just did a quick google and found one here:

http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/

thanks anyway. keep up the good work.

Yeh, we used the CSV from that site, like I said, TomB modified it a lot, if you download the package you can see what he did. If you write one in PHP, I wouldn't mind taking a look.

Thanks

James