Parse a HTTP user agent and attempt to return something that means something to a human. I started this because I needed to sanitize usage statistics by mobile phones. Most user agent parsers focus on the browser, because that is what matters on the desktop. On mobile I care more about the phone than the browser, so those are the details I focus on.
Example:
require 'user_agent_sanitizer'
UserAgentSanitizer.sanitize_user_agent('Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3')
# => 'Apple iPhone'
UserAgentSanitizer.sanitize_user_agent('Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.3; nl-nl; SAMSUNG GT-I9100/I9100BUKE5 Build/GINGERBREAD) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1')
# => 'Samsung GT-I9100'
Since version 1.1.0, UserAgentSanitizer.user_agent is available:
ua = UserAgentSanitizer.user_agent('Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3')
ua.brand
# => "Apple"
ua.model
# => "iPhone"
ua.to_s
# => "Apple iPhone"
- Version 2.0: I care more about devices on mobile. On the desktop, I'll prioritize OS above browser. For this reason I broke backwards compatibility and now detect Microsoft Internet Explorer as the operating system instead of as a browser in its own right.
Via rubygems
gem install user_agent_sanitizer
Bundler:
# Gemfile
gem 'user_agent_sanitizer'
From source:
rake install
Every time I encounter a new user agent that does not resolve to something useful, I add it as a test case and tweak the parser until all tested headers are correctly parsed. See the spec
Create a Github issue and/or send a pull request.
- Parse browser from user agent. For mobile this should expose devices using Opera Mini. On the desktop, it should reveal the browser instead of the OS.