Python User Agents

user_agents is a Python library that provides an easy way to identify/detect devices like mobile phones, tablets and their capabilities by parsing (browser/HTTP) user agent strings. The goal is to reliably detect whether:

• User agent is a mobile, tablet or PC based device
• User agent has touch capabilities (has touch screen)

user_agents relies on the excellent ua-parser to do the actual parsing of the raw user agent string.

This library should be considered "alpha". Please post feature suggestions, bug or pull requests to identify more devices on Github

Installation

user-agents is hosted on PyPI and can be installed as such:

pip install pyyaml ua-parser user-agents

Alternatively, you can also get the latest source code from Github and install it manually.

Usage

Various basic information that can help you identify visitors can be accessed browser, device and os attributes. For example:

from user_agents import parse

# iPhone's user agent string
ua_string = 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B179 Safari/7534.48.3'
user_agent = parse(ua_string)

# Accessing user agent's browser attributes
user_agent.browser  # returns Browser(family=u'Mobile Safari', version=(5, 1), version_string='5.1')
user_agent.browser.family  # returns 'Mobile Safari'
user_agent.browser.version  # returns (5, 1)
user_agent.browser.version_string   # returns '5.1'

# Accessing user agent's operating system properties
user_agent.os  # returns OperatingSystem(family=u'iOS', version=(5, 1), version_string='5.1')
user_agent.os.family  # returns 'iOS'
user_agent.os.version  # returns (5, 1)
user_agent.os.version_string  # returns '5.1'

# Accessing user agent's device properties
user_agent.device  # returns Device(family='iPhone')
user_agent.device.family  # returns 'iPhone'

# Viewing a pretty string version
str(user_agent) # returns "iPhone / iOS 5.1 / Mobile Safari 5.1"

user_agents also expose a few other more "sophisticated" attributes that are derived from one or more basic attributes defined above. As for now, these attributes should correctly identify popular platforms/devices, pull requests to support smaller ones are always welcome.

Currently these attributes are supported:

• is_mobile: whether user agent is identified as a mobile phone (iPhone, Android phones, Blackberry, Windows Phone devices etc)
• is_tablet: whether user agent is identified as a tablet device (iPad, Kindle Fire, Nexus 7 etc)
• is_pc: whether user agent is identified to be running a traditional "desktop" OS (Windows, OS X, Linux)
• is_touch_capable: whether user agent has touch capabilities
• is_bot: whether user agent is a search engine crawler/spider

For example:

from user_agents import parse

# Let's start from an old, non touch Blackberry device
ua_string = 'BlackBerry9700/5.0.0.862 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/331 UNTRUSTED/1.0 3gpp-gba'
user_agent = parse(ua_string)
user_agent.is_mobile # returns True
user_agent.is_tablet # returns False
user_agent.is_touch_capable # returns False
user_agent.is_pc # returns False
user_agent.is_bot # returns False
str(user_agent) # returns "BlackBerry 9700 / BlackBerry OS 5 / BlackBerry 9700"

# Now a Samsung Galaxy S3
ua_string = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.4; en-gb; GT-I9300 Build/IMM76D) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30'
user_agent = parse(ua_string)
user_agent.is_mobile # returns True
user_agent.is_tablet # returns False
user_agent.is_touch_capable # returns True
user_agent.is_pc # returns False
user_agent.is_bot # returns False
str(user_agent) # returns "GT-I9300 / Android 4.0.4 / Android 4.0.4"

# iPad's user agent string
ua_string = 'Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10'
user_agent = parse(ua_string)
user_agent.is_mobile # returns False
user_agent.is_tablet # returns True
user_agent.is_touch_capable # returns True
user_agent.is_pc # returns False
user_agent.is_bot # returns False
str(user_agent) # returns "iPad / iOS 3.2 / Mobile Safari 4.0.4"

# Kindle Fire's user agent string
ua_string = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us; Silk/1.1.0-80) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16 Silk-Accelerated=true'
user_agent = parse(ua_string)
user_agent.is_mobile # returns False
user_agent.is_tablet # returns True
user_agent.is_touch_capable # returns True
user_agent.is_pc # returns False
user_agent.is_bot # returns False
str(user_agent) # returns "Kindle Fire / Android / Amazon Silk 1.1.0-80"

# Touch capable Windows 8 device
ua_string = 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0; Touch)'
user_agent = parse(ua_string)
user_agent.is_mobile # returns False
user_agent.is_tablet # returns False
user_agent.is_touch_capable # returns True
user_agent.is_pc # returns True
user_agent.is_bot # returns False
str(user_agent) # returns "PC / Windows 8 / IE 10"

Running Tests

python -m unittest discover

Changelog

Version 0.3.2

• Better mobile detection
• Better PC detection

Version 0.3.1

• user_agent.is_mobile returns True when mobile spider is detected

Version 0.3.0

• Added __str__/__unicode__ methods for convenience of pretty string

Version 0.2.0

• Fixed errors when running against newer versions if ua-parser
• Support for Python 3

Version 0.1.1

• Added is_bot property
• Symbian OS devices are now detected as a mobile device

Version 0.1

• Initial release