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