Why is the latitude/longitude an empty string?

[Jim Fisher]

What's going on with these lines?:

geoip/lib/geoip.rb

Line 801 in edac76c

 latitude = '' 

geoip/lib/geoip.rb

Line 810 in edac76c

 longitude = '' 

This seems rather unidiomatic - a better value would be nil. The occasional appearance of "empty string" coordinate components caused a bit of confusion for us!

[Clifford Heath]

The answers are lost in the mist of time, unfortunately, but I suspect the answer was in Feb 2005, when I wrote the first pure Ruby version matching Sean Chittendon's C extension. The longitude setting was definitely that way when I migrated from rubyforge.org to github in October 2007, see

geoip/lib/geoip.rb

Line 340 in 53457d8

 longitude = ''