Question

I am working on an example from a php book and am getting an error on line 8 with this code

<?php

$agent = getenv("HTTP_USER_AGENT");
if (preg_match("/MSIE/i", "$agent"));
{
    $result = "You are using Microsoft Internet Explorer";
}
else if (preg_match("/Mozilla/i", "$agent")); 
{
    $result = "You are using Mozilla firefox";
}
else {$result = "you are using $agent"; }

echo $result;


?>

Answer 1

Try:

$agent = getenv("HTTP_USER_AGENT");
if (preg_match("/MSIE/i", $agent)) {
  $result = "You are using Microsoft Internet Explorer";
} else if (preg_match("/Mozilla/i", $agent)) {
  $result = "You are using Mozilla firefox";
} else {
  $result = "you are using $agent";
}

echo $result;

Two things:

1. You had a semi-colon at the end of your if clauses. That means the subsequent opening brace was a local block that is always executed. That caused a problem because later you had an else statement that wasn’t attached to an if statement; and

2. Doing "$agent" is unnecessary and not recommended. Simply pass in $agent.