CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javabrowseruser-agent
Munichong
Munichong

Reputation: 4041

Detect device types from user agent strings

I am trying to detect "desktop", "mobile", and "tablet" from user agent strings. What I need is just these three rough categories. Brand and device names are not needed. Some examples of user agent I have are:

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; InfoPath.3)"

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.104 Safari/537.36"

Is there any existing API can do this?

According to the very last sentence of this article, it seems that looking for keyword "mobi" in a user agent string can handle most cases. But it seems too easy to be true......

Upvotes: 5

Views: 14537

Answers (3)

Otrozone
Otrozone

Reputation: 293

This might help.

import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class DeviceTypeDetector {
    public static String getDeviceType(String userAgent) {
        String deviceType;
        Pattern tabletPattern = Pattern.compile("(tablet|ipad|playbook|silk)|(android(?!.*mobi))", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
        Matcher tabletMatcher = tabletPattern.matcher(userAgent);
        Pattern mobilePattern = Pattern.compile("(mobi|phone|blackberry|opera mini|fennec|minimo|symbian|psp|nintendo ds)", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
        Matcher mobileMatcher = mobilePattern.matcher(userAgent);
        if (tabletMatcher.find()) {
            deviceType = "tablet";
        } else if (mobileMatcher.find()) {
            deviceType = "mobile";
        } else {
            deviceType = "desktop";
        }
        return deviceType;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4537.110 Safari/537.36";
        System.out.println(getDeviceType(userAgent));
    }
}

Upvotes: 0

Dave Voyles
Dave Voyles

Reputation: 4605

I'm curious: Why does the device type matter?

Not trying to be snarky, but trying to understand a use case.

In Cordova you can check for this, but now sure about straight HTML. I which I have done for iOS before. I needed to do this to detect when I needed to add a 20px margin to the header of a page on a Cordova app, as iOS made this change several versions ago.

Here is how I did it:

    if (parseFloat(window.device.version) >= 7.0 ) {
        $allHeaders.css( "margin-top", "20px" );       
    }

Upvotes: 0

Developer Marius Žilėnas
Developer Marius Žilėnas

Reputation: 6119

You might use UADetector library that does just that. It has device categorization feature added since 0.9.10 version.

UADetector is a library to identify over 190 different desktop and mobile browsers and 130 other User-Agents like feed readers, email clients and multimedia players. In addition, even more than 400 robots like BingBot, Googlebot or Yahoo Bot can be identified.

Upvotes: 1

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