Redirect URL according to user OS

ian_hudsonlloyd

Hi Guys,

I am losing what little hair I have left trying to think of a way of redirecting a visitor to a new URL according to which OS they are using. For example

support_win98.php for Win98 users
support_winxp.php for XP users

You get the idea. I am new to PHP so still learning its limitations.

TF_TheMoon

Why would you want to do that? I could understand based on browser but not OS?

ian_hudsonlloyd

I am creating a set of support pages and the advice to give is different for various operating systems.

Since I know that the information is in the user-agent I want to know how to extract it and redirect according to the data extracted.

Can anyone help?

kebbelj

Will this do the trick?


<?php
$agentInfo = $_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT];
echo "AGENT INFO: ".$agentInfo."<br />";
?>

TF_TheMoon

The useragent doesn't give you OS details, at least not in all browsers. Its also easily spoofed.

Horizon88

Why not just have two different sections:
Win98 Users do this:
....

Windows NT users do this:
.....

That way if they want to know for another system (say they need to fix a 98 system, but they're currently on NT) they still get the correct information.

Edit: And what happens if you have a user on Linux or mac? Do they just get no content? :/

ian_hudsonlloyd

Mac and linux users will get a default page saying sorry our software will not run.........

But I need to split up windows into its different versions.

Horizon88

You can't just put in links to the different content? I don't see why you'd force restrict this to operating system base - maybe someone ON a Linux machine wants to buy the software for their Windows machine. Why can't they see it?

Weedpacket

Short answer is as noted; the only information about the user's OS is that supplied in the request's User-Agent header (in which a browser running on Windows XP is likely to mention "Windows NT 5.1" somewhere). But that information is only as reliable as everything else about the request (i.e., not very). From behind some firewalls Microsoft Update can't even recognise IE7.

Even if you do implement something like this, you'll still need to supply explicit links to the various versions of the page as a failsafe.