Detect Browser Language in PHP

Question

I use the following PHP script as index for my website.

This script should include a specific page depending on the browser\'s language (automatically detected).

Answer 1

The problem with the selected answer above is that the user may have their first choice set as a language that's not in the case structure, but one of their other language choices are set. You should loop until you find a match.

This is a super simple solution that works better. Browsers return the languages in order of preference, so that simplifies the problem. While the language designator can be more than two characters (e.g. - "EN-US"), typically the first two are sufficient. In the following code example I'm looking for a match from a list of known languages my program is aware of.

$known_langs = array('en','fr','de','es');
$user_pref_langs = explode(',', $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);

foreach($user_pref_langs as $idx => $lang) {
    $lang = substr($lang, 0, 2);
    if (in_array($lang, $known_langs)) {
        echo "Preferred language is $lang";
        break;
    }
}

I hope you find this a quick and simple solution that you can easily use in your code. I've been using this in production for quite a while.