Serving different pages depending on IP

I have a travel site for the Greek island of Corfu, and would like to serve the Greek text pages to Greek visitors, and English text pages to everyone else.

I think all Greek IP addresses start with 212.

I assume the following:

if 'IP starts with 212' then

     include Greek text

else

     include English text

end if

Could anyone help me code the expression - 'if IP starts with 212'

Also, does anyone know how I can find out if 212 does indeed cover all of the Greek IP address.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Nathan

www.corfu-travel-guide.info

www.agni.gr

Corfu is a beautiful place. Went there years ago after I was asked to leave Italy .

The ip number method of identifying a country is not reliable. IP addresses are not assigned by country. They are assigned by the ICANN to  Local Internet Registries (LIR's). There are 4 of them - IIRC, Europe is covered by an organization called RIPE. An LIR will assign a block of numbers to major backbone providers - e.g. British Telcom, ATT, etc. How the backbones distribute is up to them. The backbone provider for 212 could use some part of that range of numbers for Greece, some for Finland, and some for the Azores.

ISP's get their numbers from the back-bone providers - an ISP in Greece might have both British Telcom and AT&T. Part of their number ranges might start with aaa from ATT, part with yyy from BT.

What ip number an end user winds up with will also depend on the location of their isp. Many isp's have branches in different countries. AOL is the best example. Your users may have a greek isp that is a branch, or gets ip numbers from a larger isp in Germany.

If I were you however, I'd still take my best guess. I'd check for number, country code on their http_referer, amd language. If you see anything that looks like it's Greek, send them to the Greek page with an English link-out on it.

http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/ has tools for playing around with country stuff.

EDIT - Did a quick look up. The 212 block is held by ATT. A quick whois check of some numbers - e.g. 212.1.1.1, 212.200.200.200, etc., from the RIPE data base - http://www.ripe.net/db/whois/whois.html -Turned up addresses in Great Britain, The Channel Islands, Holland, and Germany.

may i ask why not just write / flags where the uer can clcik a link/image with the name of the language so it is their flags or English and greek (in greek)..