What is the best method to parse a User-Agent string in Python to reliably detect
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- Browser version
- OS
Or perhaps any helper library that does it
What is the best method to parse a User-Agent string in Python to reliably detect
Or perhaps any helper library that does it
I finally decided to write my own, and I am happy with the outcome. Please feel free to use/modify/send me patches, etc.
It's here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/httpagentparser
Usage example:
>>> import httpagentparser
>>> s = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) \
Chrome/5.0.307.11 Safari/532.9"
>>> print(httpagentparser.simple_detect(s))
('Linux', 'Chrome 5.0.307.11')
>>> print(httpagentparser.detect(s))
{'os': {'name': 'Linux'},
'browser': {'version': '5.0.307.11', 'name': 'Chrome'}}
>>> s = "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.5; en-in; HTC_DesireS_S510e Build/GRJ90) \
AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1"
>>> print(httpagentparser.simple_detect(s))
('Android Linux 2.3.5', 'Safari 4.0')
>>> print(httpagentparser.detect(s))
{'dist': {'version': '2.3.5', 'name': 'Android'},
'os': {'name': 'Linux'},
'browser': {'version': '4.0', 'name': 'Safari'}}
Having run these suggestions against the full corpus of Firefox User Agents, I've found that the version-number parsing for comparison is quite poor.
If that's what you need, I suggest that you take a look at UAparser, which used to be part of the browserscope project. Documentation here.
However if you wish to parse all this on the Python side you can use the XML/INI files provided at http://browsers.garykeith.com/downloads.asp to do lookups on the user agent. This is the same file that is used in php's get_browser() function.
As this is not about an open source solution, I doubt this will become the first answer. Anyway, when it comes to User-Agent analysis, the de-facto standard is WURFL (now a commercial product.
Here is a reference to the technical docs.
https://docs.scientiamobile.com/documentation/infuze/infuze-python-module-user-guide
In addition to that, WURFL Microservice is available on the major Cloud Providers marketplaces and also supports a Python client: