How to recognize bots with php?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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']));