in reply to .htaccess and cgi

You'd need to parse the .htgroup file directly probably. The browser can't give you that information, because it doesn't know. The webserver won't set it, because the same user may be in several different groups.

Maybe you could describe exactly what you need the script to do overall; there may be a better way of going about setting up your .htaccess structure so that you may not even need the script to know the group.