Grabbing entry domain for a site.

Question

I have several domains that point to the same site, some of them ending in ".br" (domain for Brazil, thus for portuguese speakers)

I want to detect from what domain the person came (.br or not) and load the correct landuage...

I can use PHP, JavaScript or standard HTML/CSS etc... How I do it? (and with what?)

Answer 1

$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] should get that information. But this is not a sure fire way. Some people have the referrer turned off or spoofed in their browsers etc. This is the only way that I would know how, unless you can append get data to the urls on the domain to set the language etc. Then you just check for that get data.

Answer 2

On the server side, use the HTTP_HOST variable which is basically the Host header and a fool-proof way of checking the host the request was sent to.

$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

See this question for a nice comparison between SERVER_NAME and the HTTP_HOST variables.

On the client side, use document.domain. For this page - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/document.domain, the value of document.domain is

"developer.mozilla.org"

Answer 3

If you are on PHP5.3+ you can use

Locale::acceptFromHttp — Tries to find out best available locale based on HTTP "Accept-Language" header

If not, you can still determine it from Accept-Language header yourself. Using the Accept Header should be somewhat more reliable than using the TLD, especially if you also need to use any of the other intl extensions.