When a user
visits your site you know his IP, browser, OS and other stuff. You need to know if the next time the same user visits you (same IP, same login perhaps) is using the same browser. This can be achieved in two ways:
a) Create a cookie, store it in the browser and in your DB, then compare every visitor that has that cookie against your existing cookie table to identify him. If the cookie has a very long expiration time it won't be lost across sessions, and will be unique to each browser. But
it will be lost if the user clears cookies.
b) Store a string in the browser's local storage. This works pretty much the same as the cookie method but there's no expiration date for the data, and it's thougher to remove it than to clear cookies.
There are other methods, like combining different kind of cookies to provide redundancy. I remember a project called Evercookie that did something like that. I believe
it's pretty much abandoned now.
You can use the browscap library and then make an md5 of the browser information:
The get_browser() function looks up the user's browscap.ini file and returns the capabilities of the user's browser.
(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
get_browser — Tells what the user's browser is capable of
Description
get_browser(?string $user_agent = null, bool $return_array =
false): object|array|false
Parameters
user_agent The User Agent to be analyzed. By default, the value of HTTP User-Agent header is used; however, you can alter this (i.e., look up another browser's info) by passing this parameter.
You can bypass this parameter with a null
value.
return_array If set to true, this function will return an array instead of an object.
Return Values
The information is returned in an object or an array which will contain various data elements representing, for instance, the browser's major and minor version numbers and ID string; true/false
values for features such as frames, JavaScript, and cookies; and so forth.
The cookies value simply means that the browser itself is capable of accepting cookies and does not mean the user has enabled the browser to accept cookies or not. The only way to test if cookies are accepted is to set one with setcookie(), reload, and check for the value.
Returns false when
no information can be retrieved, such as when the browscap configuration setting in php.ini has not been set.
Examples
Example #1 Listing all information about the users browser
<?php
echo $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . "\n\n";$browser = get_browser(null, true);
print_r($browser);
?>
The above example will output something similar to:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3
Array
(
[browser_name_regex] => ^mozilla/5\.0 (windows; .; windows nt 5\.1; .*rv:.*) gecko/.* firefox/0\.9.*$
[browser_name_pattern] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; ?; Windows NT 5.1; *rv:*) Gecko/* Firefox/0.9*
[parent] => Firefox 0.9
[platform] => WinXP
[browser] => Firefox
[version] => 0.9
[majorver] => 0
[minorver] => 9
[cssversion] => 2
[frames] => 1
[iframes] => 1
[tables] => 1
[cookies] => 1
[backgroundsounds] =>
[vbscript] =>
[javascript] => 1
[javaapplets] => 1
[activexcontrols] =>
[cdf] =>
[aol] =>
[beta] => 1
[win16] =>
[crawler] =>
[stripper] =>
[wap] =>
[netclr] =>
)
Notes
Note:
In order for this to work, your browscap configuration setting in php.ini must point to the correct location of the browscap.ini file on your system.
browscap.ini is not bundled with PHP, but you may find an up-to-date
» php_browscap.ini file here.
While browscap.ini contains information on many browsers, it relies on user updates to keep the database current. The format of the file is fairly self-explanatory.
Francesco
R ¶
6 years ago
If you ONLY need a very fast and simple function to detect the browser name (update to May 2016):
<?phpfunction get_browser_name($user_agent)
{
if (strpos($user_agent, 'Opera') || strpos($user_agent, 'OPR/')) return 'Opera';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Edge')) return 'Edge';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Chrome')) return 'Chrome';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Safari')) return 'Safari';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Firefox')) return 'Firefox';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'MSIE') || strpos($user_agent, 'Trident/7')) return 'Internet Explorer';
return
'Other';
}// Usage:echo get_browser_name($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);?>
This function also resolves the trouble with Edge (that contains in the user agent the string "Safari" and "Chrome"), with Chrome (contains the string "Safari") and IE11 (that do not contains 'MSIE' like all other IE versions).Note that "strpos" is the fastest function to check a string (far better than "preg_match") and Opera + Edge + Chrome + Safari + Firefox + Internet Explorer are the most used browsers today (over 97%).
ruudrp at live dot nl ¶
11 years ago
To my surprise I found that none of the get_browser alternatives output the correct name / version combination that I was looking for using Opera or Chrome. They either give the wrong name eg Safari when in fact it should be Chrome and if the ua string includes a version number as with the latest versions of Chrome and Opera the wrong number is reported. So I took bits and pieces from the various examples and combined them and added a check for version.
<?php
function getBrowser()
{
$u_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$bname = 'Unknown';
$platform = 'Unknown';
$version= "";//First get the platform?
if (preg_match('/linux/i', $u_agent)) {
$platform = 'linux';
}
elseif (preg_match('/macintosh|mac os x/i', $u_agent)) {
$platform = 'mac';
}
elseif (preg_match('/windows|win32/i', $u_agent)) {
$platform = 'windows';
}// Next get the name of the useragent yes seperately and for good reason
if(preg_match('/MSIE/i',$u_agent) && !preg_match('/Opera/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Internet Explorer';
$ub = "MSIE";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Firefox/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Mozilla Firefox';
$ub = "Firefox";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Chrome/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Google Chrome';
$ub = "Chrome";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Safari/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Apple Safari';
$ub = "Safari";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Opera/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Opera';
$ub = "Opera";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Netscape/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Netscape';
$ub = "Netscape";
} // finally get the correct version number
$known = array('Version', $ub, 'other');
$pattern = '#(?<browser>' . join('|', $known) .
')[/ ]+(?<version>[0-9.|a-zA-Z.]*)#';
if (!preg_match_all($pattern, $u_agent, $matches)) {
// we have no matching number just continue
}// see how many we have
$i = count($matches['browser']);
if ($i != 1) {
//we will have two since we are not using 'other' argument yet
//see if version is before or after the name
if (strripos($u_agent,"Version") < strripos($u_agent,$ub)){
$version= $matches['version'][0];
}
else {
$version= $matches['version'][1];
}
}
else {
$version= $matches['version'][0];
}// check if we have a number
if ($version==null || $version=="") {$version="?";}
return array(
'userAgent' => $u_agent,
'name' => $bname,
'version' => $version,
'platform' => $platform,
'pattern' => $pattern
);
} // now try it
$ua=getBrowser();
$yourbrowser= "Your browser: " . $ua['name'] . " " . $ua['version'] . " on " .$ua['platform'] . " reports: <br >" . $ua['userAgent'];
print_r($yourbrowser);
?>
Anonymous ¶
3 years ago
Follow up to Francesco R's post from 2016.
His function works for most human traffic; added a few lines to cover the most common bot traffic. Also fixed issue with function failing to detect strings at position 0 due to strpos behavior.
<?php
// Function written and tested December, 2018
function get_browser_name($user_agent)
{
// Make case insensitive.
$t = strtolower($user_agent);// If the string *starts* with the string, strpos returns 0 (i.e., FALSE). Do a ghetto hack and start with a space.
// "[strpos()] may return Boolean FALSE, but may also return a non-Boolean value which evaluates to FALSE."
// http://php.net/manual/en/function.strpos.php
$t = " " . $t;// Humans / Regular Users
if (strpos($t, 'opera' ) || strpos($t, 'opr/') ) return 'Opera' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'edge' ) ) return 'Edge' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'chrome' ) ) return 'Chrome' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'safari' ) ) return 'Safari' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'firefox' ) ) return 'Firefox' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'msie' ) || strpos($t, 'trident/7')) return 'Internet Explorer';// Search Engines
elseif (strpos($t, 'google' ) ) return '[Bot] Googlebot' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'bing' ) ) return '[Bot] Bingbot' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'slurp' ) ) return '[Bot] Yahoo! Slurp';
elseif (strpos($t, 'duckduckgo') ) return '[Bot] DuckDuckBot' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'baidu' ) ) return '[Bot] Baidu' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'yandex' ) ) return '[Bot] Yandex' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'sogou' ) ) return '[Bot] Sogou' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'exabot' ) ) return '[Bot] Exabot' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'msn' ) ) return '[Bot] MSN' ;// Common Tools and Bots
elseif (strpos($t, 'mj12bot' ) ) return '[Bot] Majestic' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'ahrefs' ) ) return '[Bot] Ahrefs' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'semrush' ) ) return '[Bot] SEMRush' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'rogerbot' ) || strpos($t, 'dotbot') ) return '[Bot] Moz or OpenSiteExplorer';
elseif (strpos($t, 'frog' ) || strpos($t, 'screaming')) return '[Bot] Screaming Frog';// Miscellaneous
elseif (strpos($t, 'facebook' ) ) return '[Bot] Facebook' ;
elseif (strpos($t, 'pinterest' ) ) return '[Bot] Pinterest' ;// Check for strings commonly used in bot user agents
elseif (strpos($t, 'crawler' ) || strpos($t, 'api' ) ||
strpos($t, 'spider' ) || strpos($t, 'http' ) ||
strpos($t, 'bot' ) || strpos($t, 'archive') ||
strpos($t, 'info' ) || strpos($t, 'data' ) ) return '[Bot] Other' ;
return
'Other (Unknown)';
}
?>
Post with more depth here:
https://www.256kilobytes.com/content/show/1922/how-to-parse-a-user-agent-in-php-with-minimal-effort
The
Digital Orchard ¶
5 years ago
Good news! The latest version of PHP has a performance fix for this function. It's reportedly now 100x faster. See the ChangeLog for specifics.
Jeff Williams ¶
4 years ago
To automatically update your browscap.ini file on linux servers, you can use this simple shell script:
wget -O /etc/browscap.ini "http://browscap.org/stream?q=Full_PHP_BrowsCapINI"
chmod 664 /etc/browscap.ini
You can put it in the weekly cron job folder usually located in /etc/cron.weekly just don't forget to make the script executable (chmod 775 scriptname).
mike at mike-griffiths dot co dot uk ¶
15 years ago
You should not rely on just this for cross-browser compatibility issues. Good practice would be to include HTML if-statements for IE stylesheets as well as dynamically checking the browser type.
tim at digicol dot de ¶
8 years ago
Be aware that loading php_browscap.ini via the browscap php.ini setting may consume a non-trivial amount of memory. Current versions are several MB in size (even the “lite” one) and can eat tens of MB of RAM in each PHP process. This happens even if you never call get_browser() since php_browscap.ini is loaded when PHP is starting up.
Make sure to leave the browscap php.ini setting empty if you don’t use get_browser() – maybe you only call it only from PHP Web pages, but not from PHP CLI code.
I’d recommend comparing your processes’ memory consumption with and without php_browscap.ini being loaded. If necesseray, consider creating your own stripped-down copy of php_browscap.ini with just the browsers that are important to you.
shashank ¶
7 years ago
As ruudrp had given the code http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-browser.php#101125, I have added code for Internet Explorer 11
<?php
function getBrowser()
{
$u_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$bname = 'Unknown';
$platform = 'Unknown';
$version= "";//First get the platform?
if (preg_match('/linux/i', $u_agent)) {
$platform = 'linux';
}
elseif (preg_match('/macintosh|mac os x/i', $u_agent)) {
$platform = 'mac';
}
elseif (preg_match('/windows|win32/i', $u_agent)) {
$platform = 'windows';
}// Next get the name of the useragent yes seperately and for good reason
if(preg_match('/MSIE/i',$u_agent) && !preg_match('/Opera/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Internet Explorer';
$ub = "MSIE";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Trident/i',$u_agent))
{ // this condition is for IE11
$bname = 'Internet Explorer';
$ub = "rv";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Firefox/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Mozilla Firefox';
$ub = "Firefox";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Chrome/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Google Chrome';
$ub = "Chrome";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Safari/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Apple Safari';
$ub = "Safari";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Opera/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Opera';
$ub = "Opera";
}
elseif(preg_match('/Netscape/i',$u_agent))
{
$bname = 'Netscape';
$ub = "Netscape";
} // finally get the correct version number
// Added "|:"
$known = array('Version', $ub, 'other');
$pattern = '#(?<browser>' . join('|', $known) .
')[/|: ]+(?<version>[0-9.|a-zA-Z.]*)#';
if (!preg_match_all($pattern, $u_agent, $matches)) {
// we have no matching number just continue
}// see how many we have
$i = count($matches['browser']);
if ($i != 1) {
//we will have two since we are not using 'other' argument yet
//see if version is before or after the name
if (strripos($u_agent,"Version") < strripos($u_agent,$ub)){
$version= $matches['version'][0];
}
else {
$version= $matches['version'][1];
}
}
else {
$version= $matches['version'][0];
}// check if we have a number
if ($version==null || $version=="") {$version="?";}
return array(
'userAgent' => $u_agent,
'name' => $bname,
'version' => $version,
'platform' => $platform,
'pattern' => $pattern
);
} // now try it
$ua=getBrowser();
$yourbrowser= "Your browser: " . $ua['name'] . " " . $ua['version'] . " on " .$ua['platform'] . " reports: <br >" . $ua['userAgent'];
print_r($yourbrowser);
?>
tom at tgibbons dot com ¶
7 months
ago
PHP cron script to automatically update browscap.ini. It compares version numbers to determine if update is needed:
<?php
$eol="\r\n"; //set end of line - cron$fileurl = "https://browscap.org/stream?q=PHP_BrowsCapINI";
$verurl = "https://browscap.org/version-number";
$file = "/path/to/browscap.ini";//Find current version
$fp = fopen($file, "r+");
while (($line = stream_get_line($fp, 1024 * 1024, "\n")) !== false) {
if(strpos($line,"Version=")===0) {
list($temp, $curver) = explode("=",$line);
break;
}
}
fclose($fp);
echo("Current browscap.ini file version: " . $curver);
//Get browscap.org current version
$newver = file_get_contents($verurl);
echo($eol . "New browscap.ini file version: " . $newver);
//Update if new version available
if($newver > $curver) {
if(file_put_contents($file, file_get_contents($fileurl))) {
echo($eol . "browscap.ini has been updated!");
}
else {
echo($eol . "browscap.ini update failed!");
}
}
else {
echo($eol . "browscap.ini is up to date!");
}
echo($eol . "End of Cron job." . $eol");
?>
max at phpexpert dot de ¶
18 years ago
Be aware of the fact that this function shows what a specific browser might be able to show, but NOT what the user has turned on/off.
So maybe this function tells you that the browser is abel to to javascript even when javascript is turned off by the user.
jeremie dot legrand at komori-chambon dot fr ¶
6 years ago
Be careful if you use the "Full" Browscap INI file in your php.ini config: I wondered why each Apache thread took 350MB RAM on my server until I changed the "Full" version by the "Lite" one (45MB to 0.7MB)
Now, each thread takes only 16MB...
So if it is enough for you, use the Lite version!
zed ¶
6 years ago
To complete Francesco R, I added the version of the navigator :
function getNavigateur($user_agent)
{
if(empty($user_agent)) {
return array('nav' => 'NC', 'name' => 'NC', 'version' => 'NC');
}
$content_nav['name'] = 'Unknown';
if (strpos($user_agent, 'Opera') || strpos($user_agent, 'OPR/')) {
$content_nav['name'] = 'Opera';
if (strpos($user_agent, 'OPR/')) {
$content_nav['reel_name'] = 'OPR/';
} else {
$content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Opera';
}
}
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Edge')) {
$content_nav['name'] = $content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Edge';
}
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Chrome')) $content_nav['name'] = $content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Chrome';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Safari')) $content_nav['name'] = $content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Safari';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Firefox')) $content_nav['name'] = $content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Firefox';
elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'MSIE') || strpos($user_agent, 'Trident/7') || strpos($user_agent, 'Trident/7.0; rv:')) {
$content_nav['name'] = 'Internet Explorer';
if (strpos($user_agent, 'Trident/7.0; rv:')) {
$content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Trident/7.0; rv:';
} elseif (strpos($user_agent, 'Trident/7')) {
$content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Trident/7';
} else {
$content_nav['reel_name'] = 'Opera';
}
}
$pattern = '#' . $content_nav['reel_name'] . '\/*([0-9\.]*)#';
$matches = array();
if(preg_match($pattern, $user_agent, $matches)) {
$content_nav['version'] = $matches[1];
return $content_nav;
}
return array('name' => $content_nav['name'], 'version' => 'Inconnu');
}
p2 at eduardoruiz dot es ¶
6 years
ago
BE CAREFUL WITH THIS FUNCTION!!
This function uses a lot of CPU and RAM on the whole server resources.
Perhaps if you use this function a few times then no problem, but NOT if you use at any page request, or once per session.
Also, this function doesn't work correctly and may returns wrong values, wildcards or empty, so it's not very useful for web statistics.
The best way is to use preg_match for detect browser/platform.
