Question

I need to find the version of Chrome using PHP.

I coded this:

$ua = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.60 Safari/537.1";
preg_match( "#Chrome/([0-9]{2})#", $ua, $match );
print_r($match);

Which returns:

Array
(
    [0] => Chrome/21
    [1] => 21
)

I have two questions:

Will this work on all chrome browsers? (because the $ua is my own user agent.

Also how can I make the pattern so it returns only “21” instead of “Chrome/21” and “21” in an array?

Answer 1

This WON’T work on all Chrome browsers. What if it’s Chrome Version 3? Or Chrome Version 2245?

See me.

What I would do is change your Regular Expression to the following:

preg_match( "#Chrome/(.+?)\.#", $ua, $match );

This returns the same thing as what you have now, but it also works with any-digit versions.

array (
  0 => 'Chrome/21.',
  1 => '21',
)

You can test this here.

As for your second question, you cannot modify preg_match() to return the value like that. Simply setting $match = $match[1] works fine, though, and is completely acceptable!