Question

I’m helping put together a site that’s going to host content for different regions on the same domain. So example:

http://www.example.com/us/
http://www.example.com/uk/
http://www.example.com/fr/
etc.

I have a system in place that asks the user which site they want to view (and then stores their preference in a cookie). My question is: If they visit a URL (e.g.: http://www.example.com/us/contact.php) and their preference cookie says /fr/, how do I best forward them to http://www.example.com/fr/contact.php?

The system can read what site region they’re on and what their cookie says. So the information we would know would be: Site: US and Cookie: FR.

I was thinking of using $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] and using regex to get “contact.php” from the URL. Then using header("Location: [url]");, but I understand that Location doesn’t work if any text has already been passed to the browser… which creates all sorts of problems.

Edit:
Here’s some code to explain the problem more clearly:

<?php
// Get variable contents for $cookieRegion and $siteRegion
if($cookieRegion != '') { // If Cookie has been previous set
    if($cookieRegion != $siteRegion) { // If Cookie pref clashes with site URL
       // Forward to correct URL
    }
}
else { ?>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function(){
            // Display modal window asking user preference
        });
    </script>        
<?php } ?>

So the <script> tag would be placed before the document start… not a good idea!

What’s the best way to get around this problem?

Or, is there a better way of handling the whole problem that I could implement instead?

Answer 1

<?php
// Use this to open modal window.
$wrongRegion = FALSE;

// if there is a cookie...
if (isset($_COOKIE['region']))
{
    // I am using preg_match to ensure we are getting right parameters...
    // Sorry I am not good with Regex. You can set a better patern.
    preg_match("#/(.*?)/(.*?)\.php#is", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $m);

    // Okay! $m[1][0] is the region code on the uri. lets check if its same with cookie
    if ($_COOKIE['region'] != $m[1][0])
        $wrongRegion = TRUE;
}

....... (codes goes here)

// to where you put the modal window code:

if ($wrongRegion == TRUE)
{
    // put the modal window code.
}

so you can add a check to preg_match. It prevents to execute rest of the code.