SYNOPSIS

        use HTTP::BrowserDetect;
    
        my $browser = HTTP::BrowserDetect->new($user_agent_string);
    
        # Detect operating system
        if ($browser->windows) {
          if ($browser->winnt) ...
          if ($browser->win95) ...
        }
        print "Mac\n" if $browser->mac;
    
        # Detect browser vendor and version
        print "Netscape\n" if $browser->netscape;
        print "MSIE\n" if $browser->ie;
        if (browser->public_major(4)) {
        if ($browser->public_minor() > .5) {
            ...
        }
        }
        if ($browser->public_version() > 4) {
          ...;
        }

DESCRIPTION

    The HTTP::BrowserDetect object does a number of tests on an HTTP user
    agent string. The results of these tests are available via methods of
    the object.

    This module is based upon the JavaScript browser detection code
    available at
    http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/browser_type.html.

CONSTRUCTOR AND STARTUP

 new()

        HTTP::BrowserDetect->new( $user_agent_string )

    The constructor may be called with a user agent string specified.
    Otherwise, it will use the value specified by $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'},
    which is set by the web server when calling a CGI script.

SUBROUTINES/METHODS

 user_agent()

    Returns the value of the user agent string.

    Calling this method with a parameter has now been deprecated and this
    feature will be removed in an upcoming release.

 country()

    Returns the country string as it may be found in the user agent string.
    This will be in the form of an upper case 2 character code. ie: US, DE,
    etc

 language()

    Returns the language string as it is found in the user agent string.
    This will be in the form of an upper case 2 character code. ie: EN, DE,
    etc

 device()

    Returns the method name of the actual hardware, if it can be detected.
    Currently returns one of: android, audrey, avantgo, blackberry, dsi,
    iopener, ipad, iphone, ipod, kindle, n3ds, palm, ps3, psp, wap, webos.
    Returns undef if no hardware can be detected

 device_name()

    Returns a human formatted version of the hardware device name. These
    names are subject to change and are really meant for display purposes.
    You should use the device() method in your logic. Returns one of:
    Android, Audrey, BlackBerry, Nintendo DSi, iopener, iPad, iPhone, iPod,
    Amazon Kindle, Nintendo 3DS, Palm, Sony PlayStation 3, Sony Playstation
    Portable, WAP capable phone, webOS. Also Windows-based smartphones will
    output various different names like HTC T7575. Returns undef if this is
    not a device or if no device name can be detected.

 browser_properties()

    Returns a list of the browser properties, that is, all of the tests
    that passed for the provided user_agent string. Operating systems,
    devices, browser names, mobile and robots are all browser properties.

Detecting Browser Version

    Please note that that the version(), major() and minor() methods have
    been superceded as of release 1.07 of this module. They are not yet
    deprecated, but should be replaced with public_version(),
    public_major() and public_minor() in new development.

    The reasoning behind this is that version() method will, in the case of
    Safari, return the Safari/XXX numbers even when Version/XXX numbers are
    present in the UserAgent string. Because this behaviour has been in
    place for so long, some clients may have come to rely upon it. So, it
    has been retained in the interest of "bugwards compatibility", but in
    almost all cases, the numbers returned by public_version(),
    public_major() and public_minor() will be what you are looking for.

 public_version()

    Returns the browser version as a floating-point number.

 public_major()

    Returns the integer portion of the browser version.

 public_minor()

    Returns the decimal portion of the browser version as a floating-point
    number less than 1. For example, if the version is 4.05, this method
    returns .05; if the version is 4.5, this method returns .5.

    On occasion a version may have more than one decimal point, such as
    'Wget/1.4.5'. The minor version does not include the second decimal
    point, or any further digits or decimals.

 version($version)

    This is probably not what you want. Please use either public_version()
    or engine_version() instead.

    Returns the version as a floating-point number. If passed a parameter,
    returns true if it is equal to the version specified by the user agent
    string.

 major($major)

    This is probably not what you want. Please use either public_major() or
    engine_major() instead.

    Returns the integer portion of the browser version. If passed a
    parameter, returns true if it equals the browser major version.

 minor($minor)

    This is probably not what you want. Please use either public_minor() or
    engine_minor() instead.

    Returns the decimal portion of the browser version as a floating-point
    number less than 1. For example, if the version is 4.05, this method
    returns .05; if the version is 4.5, this method returns .5. This is a
    change in behavior from previous versions of this module, which
    returned a string.

    If passed a parameter, returns true if equals the minor version.

    On occasion a version may have more than one decimal point, such as
    'Wget/1.4.5'. The minor version does not include the second decimal
    point, or any further digits or decimals.

 beta($beta)

    Returns any the beta version, consisting of any non-numeric characters
    after the version number. For instance, if the user agent string is
    'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0b2; Windows NT)', returns 'b2'. If
    passed a parameter, returns true if equal to the beta version. If the
    beta starts with a dot, it is thrown away.

Detecting Rendering Engine

 engine_string()

    Returns one of the following:

    Gecko, KHTML, Trident, MSIE, NetFront

    Returns undef if no string can be found.

 engine_version()

    Returns the version number of the rendering engine. Currently this only
    returns a version number for Gecko and Trident. Returns undef for all
    other engines. The output is simply engine_major added with
    engine_minor.

 engine_major()

    Returns the major version number of the rendering engine. Currently
    this only returns a version number for Gecko and Trident. Returns undef
    for all other engines.

 engine_minor()

    Returns the minor version number of the rendering engine. Currently
    this only returns a version number for Gecko and Trident. Returns undef
    for all other engines.

Detecting OS Platform and Version

    The following methods are available, each returning a true or false
    value. Some methods also test for the operating system version. The
    indentations below show the hierarchy of tests (for example, win2k is
    considered a type of winnt, which is a type of win32)

 windows()

        win16 win3x win31
        win32
            winme win95 win98
            winnt
                win2k winxp win2k3 winvista win7
                win8
                    win8_0 win8_1
        wince
        winphone
            winphone7 winphone7_5 winphone8

 dotnet()

 chromeos()

 firefoxos()

 mac()

    mac68k macppc macosx ios

 os2()

 bb10()

 rimtabletos()

 unix()

      sun sun4 sun5 suni86 irix irix5 irix6 hpux hpux9 hpux10
      aix aix1 aix2 aix3 aix4 linux sco unixware mpras reliant
      dec sinix freebsd bsd

 vms()

 amiga()

 ps3gameos()

 pspgameos()

    It may not be possibile to detect Win98 in Netscape 4.x and earlier. On
    Opera 3.0, the userAgent string includes "Windows 95/NT4" on all Win32,
    so you can't distinguish between Win95 and WinNT.

 os_string()

    Returns one of the following strings, or undef. This method exists
    solely for compatibility with the HTTP::Headers::UserAgent module.

      Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2K, WinXP, Win2k3, WinVista, Win7, Win8,
      Win8.1, Windows Phone, Mac, Mac OS X, iOS, Win3x, OS2, Unix, Linux,
      Chrome OS, Firefox OS, Playstation 3 GameOS, Playstation Portable GameOS,
      RIM Tablet OS, BlackBerry 10

Detecting Browser Vendor

    The following methods are available, each returning a true or false
    value. Some methods also test for the browser version, saving you from
    checking the version separately.

  aol aol3 aol4 aol5 aol6

  chrome

  curl

  emacs

  firefox

  gecko

  icab

  ie ie3 ie4 ie4up ie5 ie5up ie55 ie55up ie6 ie7 ie8 ie9 ie10 ie11

  ie_compat_mode

    The ie_compat_mode is used to determine if the IE user agent is for the
    compatibility mode view, in which case the real version of IE is higher
    than that detected. The true version of IE can be inferred from the
    version of Trident in the engine_version method.

  java

  konqueror

  lotusnotes

  lynx links elinks

  mobile_safari

  mosaic

  mozilla

  neoplanet neoplanet2

  netfront

  netscape nav2 nav3 nav4 nav4up nav45 nav45up navgold nav6 nav6up

  opera opera3 opera4 opera5 opera6 opera7

  realplayer

    The realplayer method above tests for the presence of either the
    RealPlayer plug-in "(r1 " or the browser "RealPlayer".

  realplayer_browser

    The realplayer_browser method tests for the presence of the RealPlayer
    browser (but returns 0 for the plugin).

  safari

  staroffice

  webtv

    Netscape 6, even though its called six, in the User-Agent string has
    version number 5. The nav6 and nav6up methods correctly handle this
    quirk. The Firefox test correctly detects the older-named versions of
    the browser (Phoenix, Firebird).

 browser_string()

    Returns undef on failure. Otherwise returns one of the following:

    Netscape, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, MSIE, WebTV, AOL Browser, Opera,
    Mosaic, Lynx, Links, ELinks, RealPlayer, IceWeasel, curl, puf,
    NetFront, Mobile Safari, BlackBerry, Obigo, Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3DS,
    StarOffice, Lotus Notes, iCab.

 gecko_version()

    If a Gecko rendering engine is used (as in Mozilla or Firefox), returns
    the version of the renderer (e.g. 1.3a, 1.7, 1.8) This might be more
    useful than the particular browser name or version when correcting for
    quirks in different versions of this rendering engine. If no Gecko
    browser is being used, or the version number can't be detected, returns
    undef.

Detecting Other Devices

    The following methods are available, each returning a true or false
    value.

  android

  audrey

  avantgo

  blackberry

  dsi

  iopener

  iphone

  ipod

  ipad

  kindle

  n3ds

  obigo

  palm

  webos

  wap

  psp

  ps3

 mobile()

    Returns true if the browser appears to belong to a handheld device.

 tablet()

    Returns true if the browser appears to belong to a tablet device.

 robot()

    Returns true if the user agent appears to be a robot, spider, crawler,
    or other automated Web client.

    The following additional methods are available, each returning a true
    or false value. This is by no means a complete list of robots that
    exist on the Web.

  ahrefs

  altavista

  askjeeves

  baidu

  facebook

  getright

  google

  googleadsbot

  googleadsense

  googlemobile

  infoseek

  linkexchange

  lwp

  lycos

  mj12bot

  msn (same as bing)

  puf

  slurp

  webcrawler

  wget

  yahoo

  yandex

  yandeximages

CREDITS

    Lee Semel, lee@semel.net (Original Author)

    Peter Walsham (co-maintainer)

    Olaf Alders, olaf at wundercounter.com (co-maintainer)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    Thanks to the following for their contributions:

    cho45

    Leonardo Herrera

    Denis F. Latypoff

    merlynkline

    Simon Waters

    Toni Cebrin

    Florian Merges

    david.hilton.p

    Steve Purkis

    Andrew McGregor

    Robin Smidsrod

    Richard Noble

    Josh Ritter

    Mike Clarke

    Marc Sebastian Pelzer

    Alexey Surikov

    Maros Kollar

    Jay Rifkin

    Luke Saunders

    Jacob Rask

    Heiko Weber

    Jon Jensen

    Jesse Thompson

    Graham Barr

    Enrico Sorcinelli

    Olivier Bilodeau

    Yoshiki Kurihara

    Paul Findlay

    Uwe Voelker

    Douglas Christopher Wilson

    John Oatis

    Atsushi Kato

    Ronald J. Kimball

    Bill Rhodes

    Thom Blake

    Aran Deltac

    yeahoffline

    David Ihnen

    Hao Wu

    Perlover

TO DO

    The _engine() method currently only handles Gecko and Trident. It needs
    to be expanded to handle other rendering engines.

    POD coverage is also not 100%.

SEE ALSO

    "Browser ID (User-Agent) Strings",
    http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/browser_ids.htm

    HTML::ParseBrowser.


SUPPORT

    You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

        perldoc HTTP::BrowserDetect

    You can also look for information at:

      * GitHub Source Repository

      http://github.com/oalders/http-browserdetect

      * Reporting Issues

      https://github.com/oalders/http-browserdetect/issues

      * AnnoCPAN: Annotated CPAN documentation

      http://annocpan.org/dist/HTTP-BrowserDetect

      * CPAN Ratings

      http://cpanratings.perl.org/d/HTTP-BrowserDetect

      * Search CPAN

      https://metacpan.org/module/HTTP::BrowserDetect

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

    The biggest limitation at this point is the test suite, which really
    needs to have many more UserAgent strings to test against.

CONTRIBUTING

    Patches are certainly welcome, with many thanks for the excellent
    contributions which have already been received. The preferred method of
    patching would be to fork the GitHub repo and then send me a pull
    request, but plain old patch files are also welcome.

    If you're able to add test cases, this will speed up the time to
    release your changes. Just edit t/useragents.json so that the test
    coverage includes any changes you have made. Please contact me if you
    have any questions.

    This distribution uses Dist::Zilla. If you're not familiar with this
    module, please see
    https://github.com/oalders/http-browserdetect/issues/5 for some helpful
    tips to get you started.

