UserAgent parsing with PHP for Browser, Operating system, mobile, tablet detection

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Hi Guys,

While working on this project lately I realized that I had this requirement with I have to detect User browser and their operating system.

All this information is present in request header USER_AGENT.

Well you can detect what user is using to browse your website.

Now while working on this requirement, I thought maybe its a wise thing to search around if something really cool exist other than getBrowser function in PHP.

I was glad that I found

https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser

This library also have extensions for Javascript and Python just in case you want to use those. But in this post I am touching functionality available for PHP.

Alright so when you extract the downloaded archive or if you git clone the above repo, you will see that there is a directory called php that is where file UAParser.php exists.

Here is a code to extract some really good info from USER_AGENT header

 

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<?php
 
   require("UAParser.php");
   // lets load our uaObject with USER_AGENT parsed data
   $usObject = UA::parse();
 
   // lets get the browser
   echo $usObject->browserFull;
   // -> "Chrome 20.0.1132"
   // just the browser name.
   echo $usObject->browser;
   // -> "Chrome"
 
   echo $usObject->version;
   // -> "20.0.1132"
 
   // this is major version of the browser. May not be used that often
   echo $usObject->major;
   // -> 20 
 
   // extract the Operating system
   echo $usObject->os;
   // -> "Windows 7"  
 
?>

 

The above function is just a hint of this powerful library. It does not stop here.

There are other very helpful functions available too like for example

  $usObject->device; // will return device name in selected cases

Just in case you want to detect if the device is Mobile, Tablet use this

$usObject->isMobile; // return bool if the user is using mobile browser
  $usObject->isMobileDevice; // return true if its a mobile device
  $usObject->isTablet; // return true if requesting device is a tablet
  $usObject->isComputer; // return true if device is a computer as per USER_AGENT info

User-Agent for my tests

User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.47 Safari/536.11

Usage example

Say you have different themes for your website one for mobile and another for desktop browsers or you have 2 different sites for each of them. You can do something like this

require("UAParser.php");
 
    // lets parse the user agent information
    $uaObject = UA::parse();
 
    // lets redirect to my mobile site if isMobile returns true
    if ($uaObject->isMobile) {
        header("location:http://jaspreetchahal.org");
    }
    // above if condition redirects the condition below load the responsive CSS themes. This is just an example. you should use it as per your requirement
    if ($uaObject->isMobile) {
           echo '<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen,print" href="mobile.css">';
    }
    else {
          echo '<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen,print" href="desktop.css">';
    }

Getting YAML files

Just in case the script asks you for missing  YAML files do this (change the paths)

 

Demo

http://jaspreetchahal.org/examples/ua-parser-test.php

 

You can do all of the above with Javascript and Python nodes too that come with above library.

I hope that I have moved you in the right direction if detecting a browser, device, operating system etc is on the list of requirements that you are working on now.

Cheers

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