detection for iPhone - confused

[nycgeek]

Thanks for the software and website. Been using it for over a year. I have a webpage that is using FCKeditor and that was not compatible with Opera and Safari (now safari is compatible and soon when Opera 9.5 it will be too). Now I've noticed that iPhone is not compatible as well. So checked the new YUI Rich Text editor as possible replacement for FCKeditor ... turns out that one is also not iPhone compatible. I think I need to start testing for Opera version once 9.5 becomes available. Have not needed to do that yet.

So want to detect for iPhone and can't seem to figure out what call to make (the parameter choice) to your function.

just googled and found this:

:: Quote ::

Grab that same environment value from a slick Apple iPhone query, though, and the values are quite a bit different:

HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C25 Safari/419.3

so I need to seek the string "iphone" in the lowercase converted HTTP_USER_AGENT string.

I can probably do this myself with a PHP string function, but that's pretty much the whole reason for your function in the first place. Just, I can't figure out how to use it ... it is confusing me. On line 87:

$browser_user_agent = ....

that gets the HTTP_USER_AGENT string and converts to lower case. But after that I'm lost.

Would you kindly advise how to use your function and detect for iPhone user. Please email me in addition to responding in your forum so I don't miss ya. Thanks a lot for the effort on this.

[jeffd]

A reasonable question. The main problem with trying to do even a half-assed handheld device identification is that there are just so many of them, there is no standard, each subversion from each company could run completely different operating systems, etc.

But I agree it's probably time to add a basic handheld detection option to the script, and we'll see if we can't get something up to do that over the next few days.

The right way to handle it I think is create a separate test, which will then return the basic handheld type, eg, blackberry, iphone, etc.

You'll also be able to extract the normal OS and browser data.

This should be fairly easy to do, and shouldn't require any massive changes, just needs simply adding one more return option to the script, which won't break any existing installs I think, hopefully anyway, and will add that one extra functionality.

Your sample string is helpful, as you can see, you can determine a few things automatically: it's a mac, it's running osx, it's running khtml/safari, mobile version, and it's iphone.

Many other handheld strings give only the barrest of information, like blackberry23254/23

[nycgeek]

Thanks, and for the quick reply. Appreciated.

I think you know exactly how to upgrade for a few more detctions. Perhaps use parameter "phone" and have it return blank "" if not a phone, or return "iPhone" or "n95" or whatever. Yahoo is using the terminology "A Grade" phone. Perhaps you can just add 1 or 2 now and then more in future if needed. I do think iPhone is popular enough with millions of them in service already.

You might also add "phone_version" parameter if you think that will have impact for programmers. I'm not sure about it. Perhaps old versions will need to be detected.

I'm using it for populating a text area with either regular text if nonFCKedior, or html marked up text if ok to use FCKeditor. Actually not even loading the editor if client browser can't handle it. That saves a bunch of time. Dang WYSIWYG editors are slooooooow.