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

Question

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.