Checking browser's language by PHP?

Question

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.

Do you mean "people in US" or "people with language: en-us"? What happens when I take my en-uk notebook to the U.S. of A.? — Piskvor left the building, Mar 06 '09 at 21:19

bobince · Accepted Answer · 2009-03-06T22:01:22.010

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.)

Do you mean to replace HTTP_USER_AGENT by HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE in the above code? — Léo Léopold Hertz 준영, Mar 06 '09 at 21:57

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 06 '09 at 20:57

3

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');
?>

answered Mar 06 '09 at 20:57

chaos

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HTTP_USER_AGENT will match most of those who have the en-us version of the *browser*. You should be checking HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE – Piskvor left the building Mar 06 '09 at 21:45
Piskvor: I don't know, the general Firefox download shows as en-GB for me. – Ross Mar 06 '09 at 22:01
case insensitve: `preg_match('/en-us/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'])` – Junior Mayhé Dec 02 '12 at 15:24

jonstjohn · Answer 3 · 2009-03-06T21:15:20.360

2

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.

edited Mar 06 '09 at 21:15

answered Mar 06 '09 at 20:41

jonstjohn

59,650
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ah, shoot. I saw that you accepted then de-accepted the answer. Looks like I forgot the forward slashes (as chaos found). – jonstjohn Mar 06 '09 at 21:14

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 22 '12 at 12:04

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/

Checking browser's language by PHP?

4 Answers4

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