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Introduction

These pages show you how to set up and use the 51Degrees device detection API. For more information on how device detection works and can benefit you, please visit our Device Detection Page . If you’re using our cloud based device detection, you should refer to the Cloud API Documentation pages . All source code, and the free Lite data, is licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 2 .

Get Going With Our Tutorials

Getting started example of using 51Degrees device detection. The example shows how to:

  1. Fetch a pointer to the 51Degrees device detection provider instance. This is instantiated on server startup and uses settings from php.ini.

    										
    $provider = FiftyOneDegreesPatternV3::provider_get();
    
    										
  2. Produce a match for a single HTTP User-Agent header

    										
    my $match = $provider->getMatch($userAgent)
    
    										
  3. Extract the value of the IsMobile property

    										
    $match->getValue('IsMobile')
    
    										
This example assumes you have the 51Degrees PHP API installed correctly, and have FiftyOneDegreesPatternV3.php in this directory.

Full Source File
										
require("../pattern/FiftyOneDegreesPatternV3.php");

$provider = FiftyOneDegreesPatternV3::provider_get();

// User-Agent string of an iPhone mobile device.
$mobileUserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1 like Mac OS X) ".
"AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) 'Version/7.0 Mobile/11D167 ".
"Safari/9537.53";

// User-Agent string of Firefox Web browser version 41 on desktop.
$desktopUserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:41.0) ".
"Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0";

// User-Agent string of a MediaHub device.
$mediaHubUserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; X7 Quad Core ".
"Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 ".
"Chrome/30.0.0.0 Safari/537.36";

echo "Starting Getting Started Example.<br>\n";

// Carries out a match with a mobile User-Agent.
echo "<br>\nMobile User-Agent: ".$mobileUserAgent."<br>\n";
$match = $provider->getMatch($mobileUserAgent);
echo "IsMobile: ".$match->getValue("IsMobile")."<br>\n";

// Carries out a match with a desktop User-Agent.
echo "<br>\nDesktop User-Agent: ".$desktopUserAgent."<br>\n";
$match = $provider->getMatch($desktopUserAgent);
echo "IsMobile: ".$match->getValue("IsMobile")."<br>\n";

// Carries out a match with a MediaHub User-Agent.
echo "<br>\nMediaHub User-Agent: ".$mediaHubUserAgent."<br>\n";
$match = $provider->getMatch($mediaHubUserAgent);
echo "IsMobile: ".$match->getValue("IsMobile")."<br>\n";


										
Full Source File

For more examples see the tutorial pages.

Implementation

PHP API loads device data from the data file into memory. The amount of memory required will depend on the data file you use.

How Does Device Detection Work

51Degrees device detection implementation does not rely on regular expressions, instead our algorithm looks at character positions in the HTTP User-Agent string and picks a set of signatures that represents the closest match. Then a set of four profiles (one for each of the following components: hardware, software, browser and crawler) is derived from those signatures. Properties and the corresponding values are then derived from those profiles. For more information and examples please see the How Device Detection Works  page.

Premium and Enterprise data files can benefit from automatic update capabilities. If you're a Lite user you can contact us for a free evaluation to experience the benefits of automatic updates and check out the  extra properties and features that come with Premium and Enterprise data files.

The latest Premium and Enterprise data files can be obtained from the downloads area.

Prerequisites and Compatibility

  • PHP v5 or PHP v7
  • g++ 4.8.4+
  • make
  • git
  • SWIG 2.0+ for PHP v5, 3.0.13+ for PHP v7