Geolocation
Geolocation is the process of determining the real-world physical location of a device, a user, or a piece of content. On the web, a browser can report a device’s coordinates directly through the HTML5 Geolocation API, using GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, or cell-tower triangulation, and a PHP backend then simply receives and stores the latitude and longitude sent by client-side JavaScript. When no device-reported coordinates are available, an approximate location can instead be inferred server-side from the visitor’s IP address, a technique known as GeoIP. Typical uses in applications include localizing content and currency, restricting or redirecting access by country, pre-filling shipping addresses, powering store-locator features, and enriching analytics or fraud-detection signals with a rough location.
<?php
// Coordinates sent by the browser's navigator.geolocation API as POST fields
$latitude = (float) ($_POST['latitude'] ?? 0);
$longitude = (float) ($_POST['longitude'] ?? 0);
if ($latitude !== 0.0 && $longitude !== 0.0) {
echo "User is near {$latitude}, {$longitude}";
}
?>