[dedalus]

Sorry if this is too basic, but I don’t seem to be up to working this out for myself today (quite drunk).

The thing is, I’m in the process of setting up a hybrid English and German website, and I would like to know how I can automatically re‑direct visitors to the appropriate version corresponding to their default language settings.

IP location does not cut it (expats), I need to pull the system language from somewhere.

Spanks.

[touchmatter]

Sure this is an easy one !
You need to check the value of the HTTP header: Accept-Languages
It should contains the prefered language in the order the user would like to see the web site. You can read more in section 14.4 of HTTP/1.1: Header Field Definitions

Stéphane
Welcome | TouchMatter
Give an app a chance with TapPerso 1.0

[dedalus]

Thank you. I would enter that into my .htaccess file, right?

Interesting app, by the way. I like the idea.

[Oisín]

No, you’d have to load it as a variable in your script, and then serve up the corresponding page based on the contents of that variable.

[dedalus]

Are you sure?

The way I understand this site here, it should be possible to define it in .htaccess:
Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters

I was really hoping I could do it this way, seems more elegant than PHP.

[Oisín]

This would appear to indicate that you’re right. As long as you’re willing to use mod_rewrite, as well, you can 301-redirect the user to a language-specific page. I never even considered that way of doing it (probably because I rarely use .htaccess for much at all).

[dedalus]

That does sound pretty definitive. Great find, thanks Oisín.