Get operating system info

Question

I recently started wondering about sites like http://thismachine.info/ that get the user's operating system info. I have not been able to find out how to do that with PHP, and wanted to try to figure it out.

I noticed that they list the user-agent, which gives lots of info about the browser. Do they get the operating system information from that, or from something else? Is there an API I could use to get the user's operating system?

I see how they got the Browser and IP, but could not figure out the Operating System part!

Answer 1

If you want very few info like a class in your html for common browsers for instance, you could use:

function get_browser()
{
    $browser = '';
    $ua = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
    if (preg_match('~(?:msie ?|trident.+?; ?rv: ?)(\d+)~', $ua, $matches)) $browser = 'ie ie'.$matches[1];
    elseif (preg_match('~(safari|chrome|firefox)~', $ua, $matches)) $browser = $matches[1];

    return $browser;
}

which will return 'safari' or 'firefox' or 'chrome', or 'ie ie8', 'ie ie9', 'ie ie10', 'ie ie11'.