in reply to Short and Sweet Browser Detection

I would suggest making your structure a hash, so you don't have to loop. With a long list (like if you add Lynx, Chimera, iCab, DoCoMo, etc...) the looping is uneeded. 
my $user_agent = {"Mozilla" => {string => "Mozilla", url => "http://mo
+zilla.org"},
                  "Opena" => # etc...
                  };

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May serve you well. Just make sure the keys are the user agent info you want, and manipulate $ENV{USER_AGENT} to remove any OS info (assuming you don't want that).

Cheers,
KM

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Re: Re: Short and Sweet Browser Detection
by jeffenstein (Friar) on Jun 07, 2002 at 18:55 UTC

    But... You'll still need to loop through, trying a match with each until you find the user agent.

    Perhaps looking for the element in user_agent that contains a slash, then stripping the version number, and using that as an index into a hash. i.e. "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)" becomes "Mozilla/4.0", then "Mozilla" which is used as a key in the hash.

    But then that may be a bit of overkill unless you're planning on matching every possible browser/wap device. Even then, the list would be under a couple hundred.

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      Just have the keys be what the USER_AGENT string will be. No looping, that's what exists() is for.

      Cheers,
      KM

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        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]

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        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.

        You have moved into a dark place.
        It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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