redirect based on default browser locale

Rollo_Tamasi

Hi guys,
I have a site which supports three different languages, English, Polish & Italian. I am detecting the user's language and then redirecting them to the site which matches their language. So for example if you go to the site using a Polish browser you are redirect to pl.blog.website.

Everything works fine except in IE6/IE7 🙁

The problem is that if you have a secondary locale in your browser such as Polish or Italian then IE6/7 brings you to the Polish site before the English sit, even if English is the default language on your browser. This is because pl appears in the if/else statement before English.

I need to ammend the below code so that only the default language gets returned as the $lang variable. Any ideas on how I can do this?

<?php  

$lang = ($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);  

if(ereg("pl", $lang)) {  

    header("location: http://pl.blog.website.com");  

} 
else if(ereg("it", $lang)) {  

    header("location: http://it.blog.website.com");  

}else {  

    header("location: http://en.blog.website.com");  

}  

?>

Rollo_Tamasi

Ok,
So I think the problem is occuring because I am using ereg to determine the browser language when I should be using cases.

I am using this code now but it's not working for me. Any ideas where I might be going wrong?

<?php
$lang = ($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);  

switch ($lang) {
case "pl":
    header("location: http://pl.blog.website.com"); 
case "it":
    header("location: http://it.blog.website.com"); 
default:
    header("location: http://en.blog.website.com"); 
}
?>

jphilapy

Rollo Tamasi wrote:
Ok,
So I think the problem is occuring because I am using ereg to determine the browser language when I should be using cases.

I am using this code now but it's not working for me. Any ideas where I might be going wrong?
<?php
$lang = ($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);  

switch ($lang) {
case "pl":
    header("location: http://pl.blog.website.com"); 
case "it":
    header("location: http://it.blog.website.com"); 
default:
    header("location: http://en.blog.website.com"); 
}
?>

Your case will fail because case "pl" must be an exact match to the value that is contained in $lang. Whereas ereg is testing for text that is within the string.

In my situation my browser returns "en-us,en;q=0.5". If I want to test that using your case, then I need to test for it exactly as it is displayed. So my case would look like the following in order for it to be a successful match:

case "en-us,en;q=0.5";

Now using ereg will allow for me to match part of the string:

ereg("en", $lang); // will return a successful match without adding the entire string returned by HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE.

If I was you I would echo or log the value of $lang to see what it is returning exactly so you can make sure you are testing for the correct values. If the browser is not returning the exact results that you want then the issue lies elsewhere. Unfortunately I haven't played around any with the idea of redirecting based on locale so I am unable to offer much help with that.

Here is a discussion that might better help you understand your problem.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum24/320.htm

Jeff