Parsing HTTP User-Agent string

Question

What is the best method to parse a User-Agent string in Python to reliably detect

1. Browser
2. Browser version
3. OS

Or perhaps any helper library that does it

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Answering my own question ;)

Finally I decided to go by suggestion#1 i.e. write your own. And I am happy with the outcome. Please feel free to use/modify/send me patch etc.

It's here -> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/httpagentparser

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Werkzeug has user-agent parsing built-in.

New link (Jun 2018) http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/docs/0.14/utils/#module-werkzeug.useragents

Answer 5

Th Browser Cap Parser should work. It may be a bit slow though..

Answer 6

UASparser for Python by Hicro Kee. Auto updated datafile and cache from remote server with version checking.