Parsing HTTP User-Agent string
PythonHttpHttp HeadersUser AgentPython Problem Overview
What is the best method to parse a User-Agent string in Python to reliably detect
- Browser
- Browser version
- OS
Or perhaps any helper library that does it
Python Solutions
Solution 1 - Python
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'}}
Solution 2 - Python
UASparser for Python by Hicro Kee. Auto updated datafile and cache from remote server with version checking.
Solution 3 - Python
Werkzeug has user-agent parsing built-in.
New link (Jun 2018) http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/docs/0.14/utils/#module-werkzeug.useragents
Solution 4 - Python
The other responses to this question are rather old now. I believe the new standard in Browser User Agent parsing is Browserscope's user agent parser.
Also conveniently available with the exact same matching patterns in many other languages. Someday you might want to also parse some UA strings in JavaScript and you don't need to worry about inconsistent parsing.
Solution 5 - Python
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.
Solution 6 - Python
Th Browser Cap Parser should work. It may be a bit slow though..
Solution 7 - Python
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.
Solution 8 - Python
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: