Auto detect mobile browser (via user-agent?)

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?

There are open source scripts on Detect Mobile Browser that do this in Apache, ASP, ColdFusion, JavaScript and PHP.

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.

Just a thought but what if you worked this problem from the opposite direction? Rather than determining which browsers are mobile why not determine which browsers are not? Then code your site to default to the mobile version and redirect to the standard version. There are two basic possibilities when looking at a mobile browser. Either it has javascript support or it doesn't. So if the browser does not have javascript support it will default to the mobile version. If it does have JavaScript support, check the screen size. Anything below a certain size will likely also be a mobile browser. Anything larger will get redirected to your standard layout. Then all you need to do is determine if the user with JavaScript disabled is mobile or not.
According to the W3C the number of users with JavaScript disabled was about 5% and of those users most have turned it off which implies that they actually know what they are doing with a browser. Are they a large part of your audience? If not then don't worry about them. If so, whats the worst case scenario? You have those users browsing the mobile version of your site, and that's a good thing.

Here's how I do it in JavaScript:

function isMobile() {
  var index = navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mobile");
  return (index > -1);
}

See an example at www.tablemaker.net/test/mobile.html where it triples the font size on mobile phones.

My favorite Mobile Browser Detection mechanism is WURFL. It's updated frequently and it works with every major programming/language platform.

Have you considered using css3 media queries? In most cases you can apply some css styles specifically for the targeted device without having to create a separate mobile version of the site.

@media screen and (max-width:1025px) {
   #content {
     width: 100%;
   }
}

You can set the width to whatever you want, but 1025 will catch the iPad landscape view.

You'll also want to add the following meta tag to your head:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

Check out this article over at HTML5 Rocks for some good examples

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>

The Mobile Device Browser File is a great way to detect mobile (and other) broswers for ASP.NET projects: http://mdbf.codeplex.com/

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice == true)
    {
        Response.Redirect("Mobile//home.aspx");
    }
}

This example works in asp.net

You can detect mobile clients simply through navigator.userAgent , and load alternate scripts based on the detected client type as:

 $(document).ready(function(e) {

        if(navigator.userAgent.match(/Android/i)
          || navigator.userAgent.match(/webOS/i)
          || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)
          || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i)
          || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)
          || navigator.userAgent.match(/BlackBerry/i)
          || navigator.userAgent.match(/Windows Phone/i)) {

         //write code for your mobile clients here.

          var jsScript = document.createElement("script");
          jsScript.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript");
          jsScript.setAttribute("src", "js/alternate_js_file.js");
          document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(jsScript );

          var cssScript = document.createElement("link");
          cssScript.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet");
          cssScript.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
          cssScript.setAttribute("href", "css/alternate_css_file.css");
          document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(cssScript); 

    }
    else{
         // write code for your desktop clients here
    }

    });

You can check the User-Agent string. In JavaScript, that's really easy, it's just a property of the navigator object.

var useragent = navigator.userAgent;

You can check if the device if iPhone or Blackberry in JS with something like

var isIphone = !!agent.match(/iPhone/i),
    isBlackberry = !!agent.match(/blackberry/i);

if isIphone is true you are accessing the site from an Iphone, if isBlackBerry you are accessing the site from a Blackberry.

You can use "UserAgent Switcher" plugin for firefox to test that.

If you are also interested, it may be worth it checking out my script "redirection_mobile.js" hosted on github here https://github.com/sebarmeli/JS-Redirection-Mobile-Site and you can read more details in one of my article here:

http://blog.sebarmeli.com/2010/11/02/how-to-redirect-your-site-to-a-mobile-version-through-javascript/

You haven't said what language you're using. If it's Perl then it's trivial:

use CGI::Info;

my $info = CGI::Info->new();

if($info->is_mobile()) {
   # Add mobile stuff
}

unless($info->is_mobile()) {
   # Don't do some things on a mobile
}

Yes user-agent is used to detect mobile browsers. There are lots of free scripts available to check this. Here is one such php code which will help you redirect mobile users to different website.

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!

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.

There's a brand new solution using Zend Framework. Start from the link to Zend_HTTP_UserAgent:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.http.html