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Asked: 2026-05-16T18:28:08+00:00

A few weeks ago i asked a question about a multilanguage site (see Multilanguage

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A few weeks ago i asked a question about a multilanguage site (see Multilanguage site, subdirectories as language (RewriteRule)).

That works perfect (thanks for that)
But since I want to make my website nicer and I started adding more languages a new problem showed up.
I want to see if I can redirect users directly to the site in their language, if this language does not exists or a cookie is set I want to redirect users to their last language or my default language.

For now I created this part in my .htaccess

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^/?$ en/ [L,R=301]

This causes that all calls to http://www.xxx.com/ are redirected to http://www.xxx.com/en/

Now the second part, in my php code I store a cookie this cookie is set for http://www.xxx.com/

I tried the following:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} language=([^;]+) [NC]

RewriteRule ^/?$ %1/ [L,R=302]

But this gives me an infinite loop.

I also tried this, so if my language is nl redirect to http://www.xxx.com/nl/ but this also results in an infinite loop. Also this code should only be executed in some cases

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} (nl) [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?$ nl/ [L,R=302]

Can someone help me and is this possible in an htaccess or should I create some logic in PHP?

1 Check if cookie is set with a language ( I guess this should be the above stated code)
 2a If a cookie is set redirect the user to that language
 2b If no cookie is set check the http-accept language
  2b1 If this language exists redirect to that language
  2b2 If that language does not exists redirect to the default

Thanks in advance

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Accept-Language is a list of weighted language identifiers. Just the occurrence of a certain language identifier does not mean that it’s the most preferred language. There might be other languages that are more preferred (higher q value) or even not accepted at all (i.e. q=0).

    So instead of just looking for a certain language identifier, parse the list of accepted languages and find the best match of accepted languages and available languages while considering the preference order. And since you seem to be using PHP, do that with PHP instead of mod_rewrite.

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