Get Site Visitor Information With PHP
I wanted to do a few custom things with one of my site’s stats. PHP made this nice and simple with the $_SERVER array. When someone visits one of your scripts the $_SERVER array is automatically filled so as long as you know the keys then you can get all the information needed. These are the most useful items for identifying a visitor that I found in this using this array.
$_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’] gives you their ip address.
$_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] is their user-agent (What browser they are using).
$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] is where they came from.
$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] is the page they want to view.
This data is kinda useless unless you put it in a database so here’s a create table mySQL statement.
$sql = "CREATE TABLE visitors (
`visitor_id` mediumint(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`ip_address` VARCHAR(16) NOT NULL,
`user_agent` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
`time_of_visit` TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
`referrer` varchar(256) NOT NULL default '',
`target_url` VARCHAR(256) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`visitor_id`)
);";
If you’d like to explore the $_SERVER array more there is very detailed info at the php web site.
