World Map flat Mercator

If you need your user's country of origin, there are many ways you can go about obtaining it programmatically. Some may opt for a simple drop-down that prompts the user to specify his/her country. If you don't want to burden your user this way, you might look at their session data and return their country of origin, time zone, or some other useful information. If you have fancy enough APIs at your disposal, you could even reverse geocode the user's longitude/latitude position and obtain an address.

Or, you can start with their location and perform the code equivalent of throwing a dart at a map littered with creepy-looking post-it notes:

def country(latitude, longitude):
  if -130 < longitude < -60:
    return 'US'
  elif 110 < longitude < 155 and -40 < latitude < -10:
    return 'AU'
  elif -8 < longitude < 2 and 50 < latitude < 60:
    return 'GB'
  elif 60 < longitude < 100:
    return 'IN'
  return None

def timezone(longitude):
  return int(longitude * 0.0655737704918)

Submitter Zekka writes: "When we decided to internationalize our app, it became necessary to determine what country the user was in. That's not even the correct constant to convert longitude to approximate timezone. I have no clue where they got it. It should be 0.06666 ..."

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