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 <?php function list_array ($array) { while (list ($key, $value) = each ($array)) { $str .= "<b>$key:</b> $value<br>\n"; } return $str; } echo "$HTTP_USER_AGENT<hr>\n"; $browser = get_browser(); echo list_array ((array) $browser); ?>

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

Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.9 i586)<hr>
<b>browser_name_pattern:</b> Mozilla/4\.5.*<br>
<b>parent:</b> Netscape 4.0<br>
<b>platform:</b> Unknown<br>
<b>majorver:</b> 4<br>
<b>minorver:</b> 5<br>
<b>browser:</b> Netscape<br>
<b>version:</b> 4<br>
<b>frames:</b> 1<br>
<b>tables:</b> 1<br>
<b>cookies:</b> 1<br>
<b>backgroundsounds:</b> <br>
<b>vbscript:</b> <br>
<b>javascript:</b> 1<br>
<b>javaapplets:</b> 1<br>
<b>activexcontrols:</b> <br>
<b>beta:</b> <br>
<b>crawler:</b> <br>
<b>authenticodeupdate:</b> <br>
<b>msn:</b> <br>
    

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.php.