Question

i am trying to change user agent in php.ini file as follows.

user_agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone Simulator; U; 
CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OD X; en-us) 
AppleWebKit/535.17.9(KHTML, like Gecko) 
Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7Safari/6533.18.5"

after that when i check user agent in my php file with following command and this show that user agent has not been change.

echo $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

this shows : Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; Trident/5.0)

which is still not iphone user agent which i have set in php.ini file.

so please help me how to set user agent in php.ini file which switch my browser request as iphone browser request.

i have also tried with following command.

ini_set('user_agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone Simulator; U; 
    CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OD X; en-us) 
       AppleWebKit/535.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 
       Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5');

this also gives same result and i am unable to switch to iphone browser request.

Answer 1

I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. The user_agent setting in php.ini has nothing to do with $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT].
The setting in php.ini is used as a default for when PHP does HTTP requests, for example with cURL.

$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] contains the user agent that the web browser sent along with its request to your PHP script. That’s why it’s showing MSIE because you’re viewing the page in MSIE.

If you want to send a different user agent from your browser, you’ll have to use a browser plugin unless the browser allows you to freely modify it. For example like this.