nginx Device Detection Android mobile vs Android tablet

Question

detectmobilebrowsers.com provides this line for mobile detection on nginx:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "(android|bb\d+|meego).+mobile| ...

To enable tablet detection, they provide this line:

|android|ipad|playbook|silk

How can I detect phone or tablet, like at a finer grain? The issue is droid phone has a user agent string like "Android ... Mobile" and tablet just has "Android".

I looked at nginx if statements. There's no and operator, and nested if's lack documentation. I saw the NOT OR regex, and working on a solution using that:

Regular Expressions: Is there an AND operator?

Could you provide some more details what you actually want to match and what you do not want to match? `android` not followed with `mobile`? That can be done with `android(?!.*mobile)` or something like that with word boundaries. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Sep 02 '16 at 13:04
That did it, thank you. Feel free to post solution. If not, I'll do it in a couple of days. — stampede76, Sep 02 '16 at 18:35

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 02 '16 at 18:42

If you pan to match android that is not followed with mobile word, you can use a negative lookahead based regex pattern:

android(?!.*mobile)

or a version with word boundaries to only check and match whole words:

\bandroid\b(?!.*\bmobile\b)

See the regex demo

The negative lookahead contains a .*mobile pattern meaning that if the android is followed with any 0+ characters followed with mobile, the match should fail.

nginx Device Detection Android mobile vs Android tablet

1 Answers1