Question

Been searching for this for a while and can’t see a clear answer.

–> Is there a way to detect the handset language for iphone/ android handsets from within mobile web.

We want to try and improve the way we serve our pages for languages other than english.

Answer 1

In JavaScript window.navigator.language usually works except for earlier versions of Android which have it hardcoded to en.

For older Androids I suggest pulling the language parameter out of the UserAgent string (yes sniffing!), e.g.

if (navigator && navigator.userAgent && (androidLang = navigator.userAgent.match(/android.*\W(\w\w)-(\w\w)\W/i))) {
   lang = androidLang[1];
}

Here, lang might also contain the country code (e.g. ‘en-IE’) so you might have to remove that also:

if (lang.indexOf('-') != -1) lang = lang.substring(0, lang.indexOf('-'));

This is what I’ve used in a recent app and it works fine.