Auto detect mobile browser (via user-agent?) [clos

Question

How can I detect if a user is viewing my web site from a mobile web browser so that I can then auto detect and display the appropriate version of my web site?

Answer 1

for ANDROID , IPHONE, IPAD, BLACKBERRY, PALM, WINDOWS CE, PALM

 <script language="javascript"> <!--
     var mobile = (/iphone|ipad|ipod|android|blackberry|mini|windows\sce|palm/i.test(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase()));
              if (mobile) {
                  alert("MOBILE DEVICE DETECTED");
                  document.write("<b>------------------------------------------<br>")
                  document.write("<b>" + navigator.userAgent + "<br>")
                  document.write("<b>------------------------------------------<br>")
                  var userAgent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
                  if ((userAgent.search("android") > -1) && (userAgent.search("mobile") > -1))
                         document.write("<b> ANDROID MOBILE <br>")
                   else if ((userAgent.search("android") > -1) && !(userAgent.search("mobile") > -1))
                       document.write("<b> ANDROID TABLET <br>")
                   else if ((userAgent.search("blackberry") > -1))
                       document.write("<b> BLACKBERRY DEVICE <br>")
                   else if ((userAgent.search("iphone") > -1))
                       document.write("<b> IPHONE DEVICE <br>")              
                   else if ((userAgent.search("ipod") > -1))
                       document.write("<b> IPOD DEVICE <br>")
               else if ((userAgent.search("ipad") > -1))
                       document.write("<b> IPAD DEVICE <br>")
                       else
                   document.write("<b> UNKNOWN DEVICE <br>")
              }
              else
                  alert("NO MOBILE DEVICE DETECTED"); //--> </script>

Answer 2

MobileESP has PHP, Java, APS.NET (C#), Ruby and JavaScript hooks. it has also the Apache 2 licence, so free for commercial use. Key thing for me is it only identifies browsers and platforms not screen sizes and other metrics, which keeps it nice an small.

Answer 3

Yes, reading the User-Agent header will do the trick.

There are some lists out there of known mobile user agents so you don't need to start from scratch. What I did when I had to is to build a database of known user agents and store unknowns as they are detected for revision and then manually figure out what they are. This last thing might be overkill in some cases.

If you want to do it at Apache level, you can create a script which periodically generates a set of rewrite rules checking the user agent (or just once and forget about new user agents, or once a month, whatever suits your case), like

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (OneMobileUserAgent|AnotherMobileUserAgent|...)
RewriteRule (.*) mobile/$1

which would move, for example, requests to http://domain/index.html to http://domain/mobile/index.html

If you don't like the approach of having a script recreate a htaccess file periodically, you can write a module which checks the User Agent (I didn't find one already made, but found this particularly appropriate example) and get the user agents from some sites to update them. Then you can complicate the approach as much as you want, but I think in your case the previous approach would be fine.

Answer 4

I put this demo with scripts and examples included together:

http://www.mlynn.org/2010/06/mobile-device-detection-and-redirection-with-php/

This example utilizes php functions for user agent detection and offers the additional benefit of permitting users to state a preference for a version of the site which would not typically be the default based on their browser or device type. This is done with cookies (maintained using php on the server-side as opposed to javascript.)

Be sure to check out the download link in the article for the examples.

Hope you enjoy!