Submit Browser Info

[Mac vs. Windows....MAC]

How would I add a hidden field that collects the form user's browser and operating system to my form?

[-pops-]

I can only think of nefarious reasons for wanting to do this. Please disabuse me of this notion.

Or have I completely misunderstood what you are trying to do?

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

I can think of many legitimate reasons for collecting environmental information from visitors. I don't have the resources here to find out how to do it, but I know it is possible.

[PeterB]

Building visitor statistics is a very common activity among webmasters, so nothing new under the sun here...

Most of them do this through analysis of the webserver logs however. This puts minimal requirements on the browser, and happens transparently while the visitor browses the website. Sometimes however you don't have access to the serverlogs, for example when you are using a low-cost webhost. In these cases it may be a good solution to aquire this information through forms.

The key technology you need is JavaScript. You need JavaScript to automatically fill a hidden form field, with information from the JavaScript object "navigator.userAgent".

Note however two important things:

- The useragent is often "spoofed", that is the browser disguises itself as another browser, either to fool statistics or to make badly programmed websites (see next point) behave properly.

- The useragent is not the right place to search when you need to know the capabilities of a browser. Badly programmed websites may look at the useragent to determine if a browser for example supports a certain JavaScript function. This will break when the user uses an unknown browser, an unexpected newer version, or has disabled certain features of his browser. You will need "object detection" if you need to know your visitor's capabilities.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Thanks for the input! And welcome to the forum, by the way :)

[PeterB]

You're very welcome :-)

I just saw a forum on my expertise, with few messages in it, so I thought let's help out a bit...

[Belatucadrus]

Funnel Web isn't quite what you want, but may be of interest.

[Mac vs. Windows....MAC]

thanks i actually used one of dreamweaver's functions to view the remote statistics (before i had frontpage :0 )

one more thing

is there a javascript function to determine a user's IP address when they submit a form?

[Blacklight]

I recently attempted to use an older version of dreamweaver, itts just as easy to learn HTML coding :S

The other day my mate showed me a Mac based website builder, I was kinda jelous to be honest.

What exactly did you need itfor anyway? You never specified that...

[PeterB]

is there a javascript function to determine a user's IP address when they submit a form?

Not in pure JavaScript. But you can use a combination of JavaScript and SSI. SSI is an old server-side "programming" language (older than ASP for example) which is supported by most webservers. The fact that it is server-side means you are not dependend on compatibility with different kinds of webbrowsers, if it works on your webserver then it will work with any webbrowser viewing your website.

Following is an example code to display the visitor's IP address:

alert("IP address: <!--#echo var="REMOTE_ADDR"-->");