tiny browser detector

[sneakyimp]

I was wondering if anyone could suggest improvements to this. It is supposed to detect whether the visiting browser is a cellphone or other tiny browser:

/* if these strings occur anywhere in the user agent string, IT'S A CELL PHONE */
$cell_phone_indicators = array('nokia', 'sonyericsson', 'motorola', 'samsung', 'lg-', 'lge-', 'sie-', 'up.b', 'blackberry', 'iphone', 'mot-', 'windows ce', 'palmsource', 'palm');

foreach($cell_phone_indicators as $key => $value) {
    $cell_phone_indicators[$key] = preg_quote($value);
}
$pattern = '#' . implode('|', $cell_phone_indicators) . '#i';
if (preg_match($pattern, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
    echo 'TINY BROWSER!';
} else {
    echo 'not tiny';
} 

I know that the iphone technically can browse large pages in a browser. It could easily be removed.

[NogDog]

Another approach is to use CSS media types and put the responsibility on the client to know that it is a hand-held device.

[sneakyimp]

Thanks for that tip. I'm always surprised by how elaborate CSS can be.

However, the question was posed so I can display one flash movie or another so the CSS stuff unforunately won't help.

[NogDog]

Actually, you probably could do that, too. Put both flash objects into the page, and set "display: none;" for the hand-held version. Then in the style block:

@media handheld {
   object#normal {
      display: none;
   }
   object#small {
      display: block;
   }
}

(The above assumes <object> tags with id attributes of "normal" and "small".)

What I'm not sure about, though, is how "smart" the browsers are about knowing whether or not they need to download the actual media files when you do something like that; so maybe the combination of both techniques (filtering via PHP on the server and controlling display on the client via CSS) would optimize the chances of getting the desired result?

[Weedpacket]

Up until about a year ago, Opera had a bug where it (a) wouldn't download images with display:none, but (b) still wouldn't download them if that changed. I mention this because a common situation is to use JavaScript to toggle the display of different parts of the page. It makes sense in that case to have already preloaded the undisplayed content so that it's there on time.

Continuing with the server-side detection, "IsMobileDevice" is one of the properties [man]get_browser[/man] can return given the user agent string (assuming you use a browscap.ini file like the one from garry.keith.com that's linked on the function's manual page).

[Ashley_Sheridan]

As far as mobile browsers go, Flash is a bit in the dark anyway. Not even the iPhone can play Flash movies, and yes, it can view YouTube clips, but that is not the same! Newer versions of the Opera Mobile browser are pretty good, but I'm not sure if it supports much in the way of scripting.

The following code (not mine, but I forget where I originally found it, possibly php.net) shows how to use the php_browscap.ini file (you can get it from many places, like http://browsers.garykeith.com/stream.asp?PHP_BrowsCapINI) to extract information about the browser:

function php_get_browser($agent = NULL)
{
	$agent=$agent?$agent:$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
	$yu=array();
	$q_s=array("#\.#","#\*#","#\?#");
	$q_r=array("\.",".*",".?");
	$brows=parse_ini_file("php_browscap.ini",true);
	foreach($brows as $k=>$t)
	{
		if(fnmatch($k,$agent))
		{
			$yu['browser_name_pattern']=$k;
			$pat=preg_replace($q_s,$q_r,$k);
			$yu['browser_name_regex']=strtolower("^$pat$");
			foreach($brows as $g=>$r)
			{
				if($t['Parent']==$g)
				{
					foreach($brows as $a=>$b)
					{
						if($r['Parent']==$a)
						{
							$yu=array_merge($yu,$b,$r,$t);
							foreach($yu as $d=>$z)
							{
								$l=strtolower($d);
								$hu[$l]=$z;
							}
						}
					}
				}
			}
			break;
		}
	}
	return $hu;
}

$browserObj = php_get_browser();
$browser = $browserObj['browser'];
$browser_version = $browserObj['version'];
$os = $browserObj['platform'];
$crawler = (strlen($browserObj['crawler']) > 0)?'yes':'no';
$mobile = (strlen($browserObj['ismobiledevice']) > 0)?'yes':'no';