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Asked: 2026-05-26T14:37:15+00:00

I’ve written a bit of code in JavaScript that uses the window.navigator.language and the

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I’ve written a bit of code in JavaScript that uses the window.navigator.language and the navigator.browserLanguage objects to search through an array which contains these possible values.

What I am trying to achieve is to check through an array to see if any of the values within it match the browser language. I am aware that you can use PHP and check the HTTP header but I need to have this check performed client side. Anyway, I’ve written the code which is below but for some reason it doesn’t seem to return the values I want. I’ve written the function on the basis that each time the browser language matches a value in an array it will return true, else it will return false. However each time I run the function it just returns true! What am I doing wrong? Code is below.

JavaScript:

var langArray = new Array("en","en-GB","en-US","fr","de","en-gb","en-us"); 

function checkforIE() {
    if (navigator.browserLanguage) { //if the navigator.browserLanguage is supported (IE only)
        for(var i=0;i<langArray.length;i++) {
            if(this[i] = navigator.browserLanguage) {
                return true;
            }
            else {
                return false;
            }
        }
    }
}

function checkforFirefox() {
    if (window.navigator.language) { //if the window.navigator.language is supported 
        for (var i=0;i<langArray.length;i++) {
            if(window.navigator.language==this[i]) {
                return true;
            }
            else {
                return false;
            }
        }
    }
}

HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="test-browser.js"></script>
<title>Test Browser support</title>
</head>

<body>
<h2>Test browser support</h2>
<a href="#" onclick="checkforIE(); checkforFirefox();">Click here</a>

</body>
</html>

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    this[i] should be langArray[i]. You’re expecting this to refer to langArray, but that’s not correct. this refers to window.

    Also, you’re not doing anything with the return values. To combine your function behaviour, use:

    var lang = checkforIE() || checkforFirefox(); //If IE, use IE, otherwise, use FF
if(lang) alert('Language supported');
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