CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpbrowser
Léo Léopold Hertz 준영
Léo Léopold Hertz 준영

Reputation: 141110

Checking browser's language by PHP?

How can I check the language of user's browser by PHP?

I need to show a different page for people in US and in UK.

I tried the following code unsuccessfully

<?php
if(ereg("us", $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]))
   include('http://page.com/us.txt');
else
   include('http://page.com/uk.txt');
?>

I run a specific code for people in US and for them in UK.

Upvotes: 9

Views: 18316

Answers (4)

dennis
dennis

Reputation: 630

This is a zend based solution. It will also work when you add other languages.

<?php

include_once "Zend/Locale.php";

$zend_locale = new Zend_Locale(Zend_Locale::BROWSER);

// returns en for English, de for German etc.
echo $browser_language = $zend_locale->getLanguage();
echo "<br />\n";
// returns en_US for American English, en_GB for British English etc.
echo $browser_locale = $zend_locale->toString();
echo "<br />\n";

Solution seen on:

http://www.mpopp.net/2010/07/how-to-detect-the-users-preferred-language-smarter-than-google/

Upvotes: 1

bobince
bobince

Reputation: 536339

Likely just a case sensitivity issue; eregi('en-us') or preg_match('/en-us/i') should have picked it up.

However, just looking for ‘en-us’ in the header may get it wrong sometimes, in particular when both the US and UK languages are listed. “Accept-Language” is actually quite a complicated header, which really you'd want a proper parser for.

If you have PECL the whole job is already done for you: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.http-negotiate-language.php

I don't know why the other answers are going for the User-Agent header; this is utterly bogus. User-Agent is not mandated to hold a language value in any particular place, and for some browsers (eg. Opera, and some minor browser I've never heard of called ‘Internet Explorer’) it will not at all. Where it does contain a language, that'll be the of language the browser build was installed in, not the user's preferred language which is what you should be looking at. (This setting will default to the build language, but can be customised by the user from the preferences UI.)

Upvotes: 8

jonstjohn
jonstjohn

Reputation: 60266

A probably more reliable way of doing this is to perform a regex on the $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] string.

<?php
  if(preg_match('/en-US/', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))
    include('http://page.com/us.txt');
  else
    include('http://page.com/uk.txt');
?>

You are not guaranteed to get a valid and useful user-agent string, so make sure that the else statement contains a reasonable alternative.

Upvotes: 2

chaos
chaos

Reputation: 124267

Try this:

<?
if(preg_match('/en-us/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))
    include('http://page.com/us.txt');
else
    include('http://page.com/uk.txt');
?>

Upvotes: 3

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