How to correctly replace ereg with preg - preg-match

Question

I have a list of Mobile devices that I'm using to display content correctly. The depreciated function looks like this:
function detectPDA($query){
$browserAgent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$userAgents = $this->getBrowserAgentsToDetect(); // comma separated list of devices
foreach ( $userAgents as $userAgent ) {
if(eregi($userAgent,$browserAgent)){
if(eregi("iphone",$browserAgent) || eregi("ipod",$browserAgent) ){
$this->iphone = true;
}else{
$this->pda = true;
}
}
}
}
What is the correct way to replace the eregi functions?

Answer 1

If all the pattern strings ($userAgent and iphone) can be trusted not to contain special regex chars (()[]!|.^${}?*+), then you just surround the eregi regex with slashes (/) and add an i after the last slash (which means "case insensitive").
So:
eregi($userAgent,$browserAgent) --> preg_match("/$userAgent/i",$browserAgent)
eregi("iphone",$browserAgent) --> preg_match('/iphone/i',$browserAgent)
However, are you just trying to match $userAgent as-is within $browserAgent? For example, if a particular $userAgent was foo.bar, would you want the . to match a literal period, or would you want to interpret it in its regex sense ("match any character")?
If the former, I'd suggest you forgo regex entirely and use stripos($haystack,$needle), which searches for the string $needle in $haystack (case-insensitive). Then you don't need to worry about (say) an asterisk in $userAgent being interpreted in the regex sense instead of the literal sense.
If you do use stripos don't forget it can return a 0 which would evaluate to false, so you need to use === false or !== false (see the documentation I linked).