IS RSS supported conidtional

xeno

Very simple question, I just can't find it anywhere on google =(...

I want to be able to check if a user can view RSS in their browser, and if they can't generate something that is user friendly. In specific, if a user is using, for example, a really old browser and they visited http://www.somesite.com/rss.xml they would see xml code in the browser. I wish to detect this and use some rss->html converter and display that html instead. I can find the converter that's not my problem, my question is how do I check if the browser supports RSS?

i.e.

if($rss_supported)
       readfile("rss.xml");
else
       echo rss2html("rss.xml");

how do I set up the $rss_supported conditional?

Thanks

NogDog

I'm not aware of anything specific you can check for RSS, but if the $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'] string inclues "application/xml", there's probably a good chance it does.

xeno

Thanks for your quick reply,

It seems like that would work, I just tried it out the only problem that when I tried to add using a feed reader (not through a browser) I got the following error in my logs:

PHP Notice: Undefined index: HTTP_ACCEPT in _____

which makes perfect sense. Now I could also check if HTTP_ACCEPT isset and if not, is it safe to assume that this request is coming from a feed reader? Or equivalently, for my purposes, is it safe under those results to assume that the user is not using an internet browser. If so then this issue is resolved =)

NogDog

You might want to try a print_r($SERVER) and see what comes up. The various HTTP* elements are not guaranteed to be set, and might be called something else on your web server.