Facebook Graph API - how to get user country?

Question

I\'m developing a Facebook application using their Graph API. I have previously developed an app using the deprecated REST API.

I\'ve come across a problem in that

Answer 1

Use the php sdk:

require 'facebook.php';

$facebook = new Facebook(array( 'appId' => 'APPID', 'secret' => 'APPSECRET',
'cookie' => true, ));

Then ask for a signed request:

  $signed_request = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
  $country = $signed_request["user"]["country"];

Now $country has a string such as "us" for United States and "uk" for United Kingdom etc.

Answer 2

use the official Facebook Graph API /me?fields=hometown it will return you e.g. "Prague, Czech Republic"

I believe you can explode the string by needle ',' and the last element should be the country

Answer 3

According to Facebook's documentation, you can get the 2-letter ISO 3166-1 country code from the user's locale.

Facebook locales follow ISO language and country codes respectively, concatenated by an underscore. The basic format is ''ll_CC'', where ''ll'' is a two-letter language code, and ''CC'' is a two-letter country code. For instance, 'en_US' represents US English.

Example FQL:

SELECT locale FROM user WHERE uid = me()

Response:

{
  "data": [
    {
      "locale": "en_US"
    }
  ]
}

Answer 4

One solution I have found, which is merely a workaround, is to use the GeoNames API - http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html

Using something like:

http://api.geonames.org/search?q=houston%2C%20texas&featureClass=P&username=myusername

Returns results in an xml object, with the country as part of the data.

I'm not particularly happy with this as a solution however, as it adds an unnecessary layer of complications on to my application - plus requests to this free services are limited to 2000 per hour and 30,000 per day.

Answer 5

for iframe apps, then ip is not hidden by FB servers, meaning you can do ip address lookup

http://phpweby.com/software/ip2country

the script was a bit buggy for me but did the job.

Answer 6

https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?format=json&query=SELECT%20current_location%20FROM%20user%20WHERE%20uid=4&access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>

[
  {
    "current_location": {
      "city": "Palo Alto",
      "state": "California",
      "country": "United States",
      "zip": "",
      "latitude": 37.4441,
      "longitude": -122.163,
      "id": 104022926303756,
      "name": "Palo Alto, California"
    }
  }
]

FQL Documentation