Question

I’m currently working on a auto-user-language-detection for providing the content in the user’s language.

of course its possible to change the language manually, but if a user visits the page for the first time I want to provide the content in his language.

So I was googling and found the $_SERVER[‘HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE’]-Var to get a result like that:

de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3

whats the best way to filter this result to get a clear result like “EN” / “DE” / “IT”?

$rL = $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]; //  de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
$langCode = strtoupper($rl[0].$rl[1]);

the second issue on this Server-Var is that its only give me a result if the browser provide some information. Is setting a default page language the only possibility to handle that?

The second possibility I’m interested in is to get the language by IP. So if I get the Language I probably know the language of the user. But whats in multi-language-countries like Switzerland, Belgium? Whats with tld’s like .com / .net / .org and so on.

So which method would you apply to detect the users language?

thanks for helping.

Answer 1

Stick with Accept-Language. All browsers pass the header and it’s much more likely to be the language the user wanted than the crude guess of geolocation.

PECL has http_negotiate_language which can parse the header and choose a language for you properly, though in practice even the somewhat bogus method of just looking for en/de/it in the string works better than the IP sniffing.

Whats with tld’s like .com / .net / .org and so on.

Domain names aren’t usually involved in IP sniffing, which has its own backend database of IP ranges that are probably connected to some country. Reverse-resolution for country guessing is of almost no use as few IPs reverse-resolve to a ccTLD.