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 following script is a modified version of Xeoncross's code (thank you for that Xeoncross) that falls-back to a default language setting if no languages match the supported ones, or if a match is found it replaces the default language setting with a new one according to the language priority.

In this scenario the user's browser is set in order of priority to Spanish, Dutch, US English and English and the application supports English and Dutch only with no regional variations and English is the default language. The order of the values in the "HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE" string is not important if for some reason the browser does not order the values correctly.

$supported_languages = array("en","nl");
$supported_languages = array_flip($supported_languages);
var_dump($supported_languages); // array(2) { ["en"]=> int(0) ["nl"]=> int(1) }

$http_accept_language = $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]; // es,nl;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3

preg_match_all('~([\w-]+)(?:[^,\d]+([\d.]+))?~', strtolower($http_accept_language), $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

$available_languages = array();

foreach ($matches as $match)
{
    list($language_code,$language_region) = explode('-', $match[1]) + array('', '');

    $priority = isset($match[2]) ? (float) $match[2] : 1.0;

    $available_languages[][$language_code] = $priority;
}

var_dump($available_languages);

/*
array(4) {
    [0]=>
    array(1) {
        ["es"]=>
        float(1)
    }
    [1]=>
    array(1) {
        ["nl"]=>
        float(0.8)
    }
    [2]=>
    array(1) {
        ["en"]=>
        float(0.5)
    }
    [3]=>
    array(1) {
        ["en"]=>
        float(0.3)
    }
}
*/

$default_priority = (float) 0;
$default_language_code = 'en';

foreach ($available_languages as $key => $value)
{
    $language_code = key($value);
    $priority = $value[$language_code];

    if ($priority > $default_priority && array_key_exists($language_code,$supported_languages))
    {
        $default_priority = $priority;
        $default_language_code = $language_code;

        var_dump($default_priority); // float(0.8)
        var_dump($default_language_code); // string(2) "nl"
    }
}

var_dump($default_language_code); // string(2) "nl"