CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmobileuser-agentbrowser-detection
ItalyPaleAle
ItalyPaleAle

Reputation: 7334

Mobile browser detection?

We are looking for a way to determine if a user is using a mobile browser. We need to do that in PHP, by parsing the user agent string. I know this method has got many caveats, but we really need to do it that way.

Do you have any suggestion? A good (even if not perfect) updated code?

I know about WURFL, and I believe it's great, but it's not free to use anymore for non open source projects. By googling a bit, I also found this code: http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/lightweight-device-detection-php (and some variations), but I'm not sure about it. Looks like it's written really bad (look, for example, when they use $mobile_browser = '0' with the quotes around an integer...).

Can you recommend something?

Thank you,

Alessandro

Upvotes: 17

Views: 17634

Answers (5)

maxweber
maxweber

Reputation: 576

Two other ideas are:

  1. Some of the major carriers insert their own header: you can use this if you care, as long as users are through the carrier network.
  2. You can use JavaScript to detect the screen size. Lots of companies are tring to implement Responsive Design by doing tiny web pages: so, this is maybe a better, simpler approach. Also, HTML5 has media-queries to change css based on screen size.

Upvotes: -1

Larry Kosis
Larry Kosis

Reputation: 9

Sorry I mis-read your question before

There is a very easy way to detect if someone is using a mobile or PC

This is what I do

IN my form display results I add the following at the VERY end of the form data capture;

    $msg .= "Referers: ".$_POST['Referers']. "\r\n";

Then Just Under the field I add this

  [[input type="hidden"  id="Referers" name="Referers" value="[[?php 
  echo "IP: " . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; 
  echo "\nURL: " . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; 

echo "\nWebsite: " . $URL;
echo "\n\nBrowser Type:" . $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
?]]"]]

Note that I changed the

The results PRINT out like this on my emails::

Referrers: IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx // I am hiding this

URL: http://www.emailmarketingaustralia.com.au/Contact/index.php Website: http://www.emailmarketingaustralia.com.au

Browser Type:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; HTC_Sensation_Z710e; en-in) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16

What is interesting is that I am in AUstralia, yet the GEO-REGION lists me as en-in (India)

// GEO CITY

You can also get data from MAX MIND (www.maxmind.com) if you want the IP to display the city and country

This is simple and clean and gives you want you need

Upvotes: -2

Dominicanstan
Dominicanstan

Reputation: 205

Floern Thanks for the code!!!

I added the Hp TouchPad Tablet with a:

hpwos

Here it is:

$isMobile = (bool)preg_match('#\b(ip(hone|od|ad)|android|opera m(ob|in)i|windows (phone|ce)|blackberry||hpwos|tablet'.'|s(ymbian|eries60|amsung)|p(laybook|alm|rofile/midp|laystation portable)|nokia|fennec|htc[-_]'.'|mobile|up.browser|[1-4][0-9]{2}x[1-4][0-9]{2})\b#i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] );

Upvotes: 1

Floern
Floern

Reputation: 33904

I am using this one:

$isMobile = (bool)preg_match('#\b(ip(hone|od)|android\b.+\bmobile|opera m(ob|in)i|windows (phone|ce)|blackberry'.
                    '|s(ymbian|eries60|amsung)|p(alm|rofile/midp|laystation portable)|nokia|fennec|htc[\-_]'.
                    '|up\.browser|[1-4][0-9]{2}x[1-4][0-9]{2})\b#i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] );

It's short and does detect most mobile users (or rather smartphones). iPad and Android-Tablets won't be classified as 'mobile' since they have bigger screen sizes.

If you want to catch Tablets as well, you can use this:

$isMobile = (bool)preg_match('#\b(ip(hone|od|ad)|android|opera m(ob|in)i|windows (phone|ce)|blackberry|tablet'.
                    '|s(ymbian|eries60|amsung)|p(laybook|alm|rofile/midp|laystation portable)|nokia|fennec|htc[\-_]'.
                    '|mobile|up\.browser|[1-4][0-9]{2}x[1-4][0-9]{2})\b#i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] );

Upvotes: 32

Emre Yazici
Emre Yazici

Reputation: 10174

You can use PHP's built-in function get_browser(). According to the PHP Manual the output array has platform field which you may use to detect mobile browsers.

There is also a lightweight mobile device detection code by Mobiforge.

Upvotes: 0

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