I recently had the challenge of retrieving a country based on the browser language. It was used to pre-select a country in a drop down list so the user didn’t have to. I knew it wasn’t going to be 100% accurate but probably more like 80-90%.
That’s because some people change the browser language instead of their native language and others use a non-ISO standard language. And last, some clients just don’t send language information.
It wasn’t an option to use a database that mapped IP addresses to countries, so the country had to be resolved from the browser alone.
Resolve the culture
I decided to split the functionality up into two methods. The first one resolves the CultureInfo based on the browsers language.
public static CultureInfo ResolveCulture()
{
string[] languages = HttpContext.Current.Request.UserLanguages;
if (languages == null || languages.Length == 0)
return null;
try
{
string language = languages[0].ToLowerInvariant().Trim();
return CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(language);
}
catch (ArgumentException)
{
return null;
}
}
Resolve the country
The next method uses the ResolveCulture()method above to create aRegionInfo object. The RegionInfo contains all the country information needed such as ISO code, EnglishName, NativeName and DisplayName.
public static RegionInfo ResolveCountry()
{
CultureInfo culture = ResolveCulture();
if (culture != null)
return new RegionInfo(culture.LCID);
return null;
}
Now I am able to get all the culture and country/region information I need based on the browser’s language, with a margin of inaccuracy I can live with.
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