Detect iPad in php?

Question

How do I serve a different page to iPad viewers?

Answer 1

if($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] == 'Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10') {
    echo "That is an iPad";
}

See https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2010/tn2262/_index.html

Also, if you're not bothered with an exact match, you might contemplate something like:

if(stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Mozilla/5.0(iPad;')) {
    // probably an iPad
}

Answer 2

You can sniff the iPad's user-agent header via $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], but ideally, if you can feature-detect the things you want to be different on the iPad vs. any other device, that's more robust and flexible than agent sniffing.

Answer 3

Also, even more simplistic but possibly not as accurate.

if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'iPad')) {
   echo "You are on an iPad";
}

Answer 4

The user agent header in the request will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

Notice that it contains "iPad".