Often it is useful to know the country of origin of an user. A common way to determine it is to retrieve the IP address of user network and query a database or a third-party remote service that is capable to lookup the country associated to the user IP address.
This class implements an alternative that consists only on querying public servers using the whois Internet protocol. Since whois servers are public, the access to these servers is free of charge. These servers also provide information that often is the most upto date.
This class can determine the country and other details associated to a given IP address by querying an WHOIS server.
Besides the country, if available, this class also retrieves these fields of the responsible institution for the range of IP addresses to which the given IP belongs: netname, person, address, phone and e-mail .