The 51Degrees Perl Device Detector provides fast, accurate and consistent results for real time device detection. All source code and 51Degrees Lite Device Data is licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 2 .

Two device detection methods are available with the Perl solution.

Pattern is the same matching method used by our .NET, Java and PHP APIs. However all the necessary data, regular expressions and other pattern recognition methods are provided in the 51Degrees.com.c source code file. This results in a faster implementation of the method requiring very little working memory. The pattern method is ideally suited to real time device detection for web sites. As all the detection logic and data is compiled into the executable a recompilation will be required when updates are provided. Therefore the optimal implementation is via dynamic rather than static linking.

Trie indexes require a significant amount of data and are therefore less memory efficient than the pattern matching method. However they are exceptionally fast achieving millions of detections per second. The trie method is suitable for offline analysis of log files or web sites receiving millions of unique requests per minute from an extremely large range of devices.

To understand more about the differences between Trie and Pattern detection read how detection works .