Detect Mobile Devices in PHP

In this article, you will learn a simple PHP code snippet to detect mobile devices.

These days, every organization wants to make their website responsive. But what if your website is too old, or you want to make a different version of the same website for different devices. To provide better display experience, we need to detect the browser of our user. It is the best way to detect devices on the server side and prevent from loading unnecessary contents. The mobile version of the website will be open on the mobile device and the desktop version will be open on the desktop device.

HTTP_USER_AGENT

HTTP_USER_AGENT is a string denoting the user agent which is accessing the page. The website includes a user agent field in its header while connecting to a browser. By using HTTP_USER_AGENT, we can easily detect the device name.

Syntax of HTTP_USER_AGENT

$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']

Here the $_SERVER is a special reserved PHP super global variable that holds all web server information about headers, paths and script locations. These special variables were introduced in PHP 4.1.0.

In the given code snippet, we can easily detect the device name on which our website is opened.

<?php
$iphone = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPhone");
$android = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"Android");
$webos = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"webOS");
$blkberry = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"BlackBerry");
$ipod = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPod");

if ($iphone || $android || $webos || $ipod || $blkberry == true)
{
   header('Location: example.com');
}
else {
   header('Location:etutorialspoint.com');
}
?>

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