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JavaScript for detecting browser language preference
Detect Browser Language in PHP
What's best method to detect language?
I have created a website that anyone in the world can visit.
So, I need a way to know approximately what is the user's language without asking them.
Obviously, there is also a link that sets the language via cookie.
The best way as far as i know is to check "Accept-Language" HTTP header:
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']) {
// parse it and retrieve language
}
Check the header "Accept-Language" that is sent by the user's browser.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
See section 14.4 for more details on the header's format.
You can use the Accept-Language HTTP request header which is sent by every browser.
I found this function to parse it:
function getPreferredLanguage() {
$langs = array();
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'])) {
// break up string into pieces (languages and q factors)
preg_match_all('/([a-z]{1,8}(-[a-z]{1,8})?)\s*(;\s*q\s*=\s*(1|0\.[0-9]+))?/i',
$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], $lang_parse);
if (count($lang_parse[1])) {
// create a list like "en" => 0.8
$langs = array_combine($lang_parse[1], $lang_parse[4]);
// set default to 1 for any without q factor
foreach ($langs as $lang => $val) {
if ($val === '') $langs[$lang] = 1;
}
// sort list based on value
arsort($langs, SORT_NUMERIC);
}
}
//extract most important (first)
foreach ($langs as $lang => $val) { break; }
//if complex language simplify it
if (stristr($lang,"-")) {$tmp = explode("-",$lang); $lang = $tmp[0]; }
return $lang;
}
$language = getPreferredLanguage();
http://snipplr.com/view.php?codeview&id=24897
If you want the full version of it (e.g. English), you can use this array:
$languageCodes = array(
"aa" => "Afar",
"ab" => "Abkhazian",
"ae" => "Avestan",
"af" => "Afrikaans",
"ak" => "Akan",
"am" => "Amharic",
"an" => "Aragonese",
"ar" => "Arabic",
"as" => "Assamese",
"av" => "Avaric",
"ay" => "Aymara",
"az" => "Azerbaijani",
"ba" => "Bashkir",
"be" => "Belarusian",
"bg" => "Bulgarian",
"bh" => "Bihari",
"bi" => "Bislama",
"bm" => "Bambara",
"bn" => "Bengali",
"bo" => "Tibetan",
"br" => "Breton",
"bs" => "Bosnian",
"ca" => "Catalan",
"ce" => "Chechen",
"ch" => "Chamorro",
"co" => "Corsican",
"cr" => "Cree",
"cs" => "Czech",
"cu" => "Church Slavic",
"cv" => "Chuvash",
"cy" => "Welsh",
"da" => "Danish",
"de" => "German",
"dv" => "Divehi",
"dz" => "Dzongkha",
"ee" => "Ewe",
"el" => "Greek",
"en" => "English",
"eo" => "Esperanto",
"es" => "Spanish",
"et" => "Estonian",
"eu" => "Basque",
"fa" => "Persian",
"ff" => "Fulah",
"fi" => "Finnish",
"fj" => "Fijian",
"fo" => "Faroese",
"fr" => "French",
"fy" => "Western Frisian",
"ga" => "Irish",
"gd" => "Scottish Gaelic",
"gl" => "Galician",
"gn" => "Guarani",
"gu" => "Gujarati",
"gv" => "Manx",
"ha" => "Hausa",
"he" => "Hebrew",
"hi" => "Hindi",
"ho" => "Hiri Motu",
"hr" => "Croatian",
"ht" => "Haitian",
"hu" => "Hungarian",
"hy" => "Armenian",
"hz" => "Herero",
"ia" => "Interlingua (International Auxiliary Language Association)",
"id" => "Indonesian",
"ie" => "Interlingue",
"ig" => "Igbo",
"ii" => "Sichuan Yi",
"ik" => "Inupiaq",
"io" => "Ido",
"is" => "Icelandic",
"it" => "Italian",
"iu" => "Inuktitut",
"ja" => "Japanese",
"jv" => "Javanese",
"ka" => "Georgian",
"kg" => "Kongo",
"ki" => "Kikuyu",
"kj" => "Kwanyama",
"kk" => "Kazakh",
"kl" => "Kalaallisut",
"km" => "Khmer",
"kn" => "Kannada",
"ko" => "Korean",
"kr" => "Kanuri",
"ks" => "Kashmiri",
"ku" => "Kurdish",
"kv" => "Komi",
"kw" => "Cornish",
"ky" => "Kirghiz",
"la" => "Latin",
"lb" => "Luxembourgish",
"lg" => "Ganda",
"li" => "Limburgish",
"ln" => "Lingala",
"lo" => "Lao",
"lt" => "Lithuanian",
"lu" => "Luba-Katanga",
"lv" => "Latvian",
"mg" => "Malagasy",
"mh" => "Marshallese",
"mi" => "Maori",
"mk" => "Macedonian",
"ml" => "Malayalam",
"mn" => "Mongolian",
"mr" => "Marathi",
"ms" => "Malay",
"mt" => "Maltese",
"my" => "Burmese",
"na" => "Nauru",
"nb" => "Norwegian Bokmal",
"nd" => "North Ndebele",
"ne" => "Nepali",
"ng" => "Ndonga",
"nl" => "Dutch",
"nn" => "Norwegian Nynorsk",
"no" => "Norwegian",
"nr" => "South Ndebele",
"nv" => "Navajo",
"ny" => "Chichewa",
"oc" => "Occitan",
"oj" => "Ojibwa",
"om" => "Oromo",
"or" => "Oriya",
"os" => "Ossetian",
"pa" => "Panjabi",
"pi" => "Pali",
"pl" => "Polish",
"ps" => "Pashto",
"pt" => "Portuguese",
"qu" => "Quechua",
"rm" => "Raeto-Romance",
"rn" => "Kirundi",
"ro" => "Romanian",
"ru" => "Russian",
"rw" => "Kinyarwanda",
"sa" => "Sanskrit",
"sc" => "Sardinian",
"sd" => "Sindhi",
"se" => "Northern Sami",
"sg" => "Sango",
"si" => "Sinhala",
"sk" => "Slovak",
"sl" => "Slovenian",
"sm" => "Samoan",
"sn" => "Shona",
"so" => "Somali",
"sq" => "Albanian",
"sr" => "Serbian",
"ss" => "Swati",
"st" => "Southern Sotho",
"su" => "Sundanese",
"sv" => "Swedish",
"sw" => "Swahili",
"ta" => "Tamil",
"te" => "Telugu",
"tg" => "Tajik",
"th" => "Thai",
"ti" => "Tigrinya",
"tk" => "Turkmen",
"tl" => "Tagalog",
"tn" => "Tswana",
"to" => "Tonga",
"tr" => "Turkish",
"ts" => "Tsonga",
"tt" => "Tatar",
"tw" => "Twi",
"ty" => "Tahitian",
"ug" => "Uighur",
"uk" => "Ukrainian",
"ur" => "Urdu",
"uz" => "Uzbek",
"ve" => "Venda",
"vi" => "Vietnamese",
"vo" => "Volapuk",
"wa" => "Walloon",
"wo" => "Wolof",
"xh" => "Xhosa",
"yi" => "Yiddish",
"yo" => "Yoruba",
"za" => "Zhuang",
"zh" => "Chinese",
"zu" => "Zulu"
);
http://www.fractalizer.ru/frpost_267/php-array-of-iso-639-1-language-codes-names/
Take a look to $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']
You can also do something like that substr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], 0, 2); to obtain an "id" like
Beside the Accept-Language header, using only javascript you could get the language of the browser used via navigator.language (but it's not really reliable of course)
Or, using HTML5 API on modern browser, you could detect the user geolocation
Yes, you can use the Accept-Language HTTP header. This w3 article covers all issues and mentions that you also should set a cookie or equal to allow overriding of that "default language".
