get_browser

Description

get_browser() attempts to determine the capabilities of the user's browser. This is done by looking up the browser's information in the browscap.ini file. By default, the value of $HTTP_USER_AGENT is used; however, you can alter this (i.e., look up another browser's info) by passing the optional user_agent parameter to get_browser().

The information is returned in an object, 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.

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.

The following example shows how one might list all available information retrieved about the user's browser.

Example 1. Get_browser() example 1  2 <?php 3 function list_array ($array) { 4  while (list ($key, $value) = each ($array)) { 5  $str .= "<b>$key:</b> $value<br>\n"; 6  } 7  return $str; 8 } 9 echo "$HTTP_USER_AGENT<hr>\n"; 10 $browser = get_browser(); 11 echo list_array ((array) $browser); 12 ?> 13

The output of the above script would look something like this:

  1 
  2 Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.9 i586)<hr>
  3 <b>browser_name_pattern:</b> Mozilla/4\.5.*<br>
  4 <b>parent:</b> Netscape 4.0<br>
  5 <b>platform:</b> Unknown<br>
  6 <b>majorver:</b> 4<br>
  7 <b>minorver:</b> 5<br>
  8 <b>browser:</b> Netscape<br>
  9 <b>version:</b> 4<br>
 10 <b>frames:</b> 1<br>
 11 <b>tables:</b> 1<br>
 12 <b>cookies:</b> 1<br>
 13 <b>backgroundsounds:</b> <br>
 14 <b>vbscript:</b> <br>
 15 <b>javascript:</b> 1<br>
 16 <b>javaapplets:</b> 1<br>
 17 <b>activexcontrols:</b> <br>
 18 <b>beta:</b> <br>
 19 <b>crawler:</b> <br>
 20 <b>authenticodeupdate:</b> <br>
 21 <b>msn:</b> <br>
 22     

In order for this to work, your browscap configuration file setting must point to the correct location of the browscap.ini file.

For more information (including locations from which you may obtain a browscap.ini file), check the PHP FAQ at http://www.php.net/FAQ.html.