How to tell credit card's country of origin by its number?

Question

I'm trying to develop an application, which would give access to different services for people from different regions of the world.

Let's say, someone enters card number 1111-1111-1111-1111 . How do I use it to tell the country of origin?

I know that this is possible, because paypal and apple do it.

Answer 1

At first, I questioned whether this information could be gleened from the credit card number alone.

Then I found it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bank_Identification_Numbers

Edit - Don't forget about PCI Compliance if you are taking credit card numbers for payment.

Edit - Apparently the previous wikipedia page has been deleted. This appears to have similar information.

Answer 2

Use BinList. It simply tells you the country of origin by checking the first 6 digits of the card number. It has a neat Json based API as well.