How to recognize bots with php?

php bots statistics

Hugo Gameiro · Jan 8, 2009 · Viewed 21.4k times · Source

I am building stats for my users and dont wish the visits from bots to be counted.

Now I have a basic php with mysql increasing 1 each time the page is called.

But bots are also added to the count.

Does anyone can think of a way?

Mainly is just the major ones that mess things up. Google, Yahoo, Msn, etc.

Answer

You can check the User Agent string, empty strings, or strings containing 'robot', 'spider', 'crawler', 'curl' are likely to be robots.

preg_match('/robot|spider|crawler|curl|^$/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']));