Re(4):Short and Sweet Browser Detection

Then you would have to have the complete USER_AGENT string for each possible browser, which isn't really viable. Each string contains (usually) information about both the browser name, version and the OS. That is a lot of strings.

Update:

Ah, the regexp; the good old hammer. Tell you what. I spent 30 seconds looking in my perlmonk.org web log (which does *not* get any significant amount of traffic), and just from this fast survey, I could pick out this list easily:

Mozilla/5.001 (windows; U; NT4.0; en-us) Gecko/25250101
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt; DTS Agent
Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)
Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.1 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020417
Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-10 i686)
Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; iCab 2.7.1; Macintosh; I; PPC)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux 2.4.7-10 i586; U) Opera 6.0  [en]
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.01  [en]
[download]

Sure looks easy to write a regexp that picks out the important part, yes? When should we pick something inside the paranthesis? Outside? What if the paranthesis doesn't close? Is it MSIE or Opera? I'm sure it is easy; please show me.

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Comment on Re(4):Short and Sweet Browser Detection Download Code

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Re: Re(4):Short and Sweet Browser Detection by KM (Priest) on Jun 07, 2002 at 19:44 UTC
In 30 seconds I mooted the "challenge" (as you said in CB) by locating HTTP::BrowserDetect So, someone already did the hard work so no wheel reinventing needs to be done. Cheers, KM	[reply]
Re: Re(4):Short and Sweet Browser Detection by KM (Priest) on Jun 07, 2002 at 19:21 UTC
And that's why we have regular expression, and modules which do these things. Get what you need from the USER_AGENT string and match in your keys. Instead of trying to nay-say suggestions, why don't think think of the whole picture of what is available to be done. So, this guy should keep looping through all the user agents? That's absurd. `(my $user_agent = $ENV{USER_AGENT}) =~ s!<whatever>!!; if (exists $user_agents->{$user_agent}) { # foo } else { # bar }` [download] When you are trying to think outside the box, remember to look at the box. Cheers, KM	[reply] [d/l]