Beginner PHP Tutorial - 68 - Detecting a Visitors Browser Part 2 Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

hi this is Alex from PHP academy' de org
and we're back with a second part of
this tutorial for New Boston in
detecting the users browser now in the
last part if you haven't watched it
already go back and watch otherwise you
probably won't understand what's going
on
in the last part of the tutorial we use
the get browser function and we updated
a specific file in a in our PHP dot ini
file we we reference the file it's going
to allow us to use this properly
properly so we've used print R to print
out every element of this or every key
in this array in each value now if we
look through this we can see that we
might not be able to make sense out of
much of the information I'm using Google
Chrome at the moment and things like
Mozilla are appearing here so you might
be wondering why that is well if you
look through if you look through the
each key you can see that we've got this
key here called browser and that is
equal to the value of Chrome so then
we've got platform when Wester after
that blah blah blah so chrome seems to
be the only correct and sort of direct
piece of information that we've got
we've just got Chrome there we've got
nothing else so therefore this is a
really really great key where we can
extract the value and use this
information to detect the user's browser
so by the end of this tutorial I'm going
to created a program that's going to
echo out to the user what their browser
is or we could probably modify it and
say you need to use Google Chrome for
example if they're not using a browser
which is Chrome ok so we've got this
information here so we know that the key
is browser this is obviously an
associative array so what we can do is
we can come in here and we can echo out
browser
remember for arrays we use our square
brackets and we can just echo out the
key browser so now let's preview this in
in Chrome and see what happens you can
see it's just extracted that information
and this is all the information that
we're going to need let's go and test
this in other browsers so I'm going to
test it in Firefox and I'm going to test
it in Internet Explorer so we I'm going
to copy the URL and come into Firefox
first
and I'm just going to paste that in
there okay so now we've got the value
firefox so it's successfully detected
this browser as firefox let's go ahead
and open internet explorer and do the
same and you can see that it's IE which
is obviously short for internet explorer
okay so let's take these away and bro
mac chrome right so what we want to do
now is we've grabbed this information
now what we want to do is we want to
detect the user's browser in terms of
telling them that if they're not using
chrome they should do so I'm going to
put this browser equal to browser
browser so this might look a bit
confusing but what I'm in fact doing is
creating it is replacing this variable
but taking the value of this from this
we're not going to need any more
information from this so what we're
doing is we're restoring the information
in here so we can still come down an
aircraft browser will do exactly the
same thing there we go
so back to our text editor and we're
going to create an if statement now I'm
going to say if browser doesn't equal
chrome then do something now the problem
with this is is we're using a capital C
usually but what we want to do is we
want to ensure that we put everything to
lowercase so I'm going to say STR to
lower so we've converted Chrome to
lowercase let's just kill the page there
and we can echo browser because you have
now converted this from chrome to Chrome
lowercase so now we can perform an
appropriate check on this and so it's if
browser doesn't equal chrome echo you're
not using google chrome please do so
let's just escape this character so I'm
using at an inverted common air or
rather a yes single quotation mark let's
go back now and refresh now nothing's
happened why is this because we're using
Chrome what happens now if we go back
into Firefox and refresh we're going to
get this message you're not using Google
Chrome please do and
what about Internet Explorer let's go
back and refresh and see what happens
you're not using Google Chrome please do
so you can see how this is a really
simple but effective way to detect the
user's browser first of all and I'm
going to leave it up to you guys to play
around with this and do whatever you
want with it basically you can either
tell the user what browser they're using
or you could create maybe a switch
statement to do this it'd be a lot
easier you could do exactly what I've
done and said you're not using Google
Chrome please do there's a variety of
uses you can get out of detecting the
user's browser this is just one but now
that you know how to do it you can
experiment them for yourself