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This is my user agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31

I know I am using chrome, so I understand it is from chrome version 26. But what is the rest of the information?

How can I read the string. And what all I can collect from userAgent?

What is the best way to parse the userAgent and read each property in it?

HaBo
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2 Answers2

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From developer.mozilla.org:

Syntax

User-Agent: <product> / <product-version> <comment>

Common format for web browsers:

User-Agent: Mozilla/<version> (<system-information>) <platform> (<platform-details>) <extensions>

Directives

<product>
  A product identifier

<product-version>
  A version number of the product.

<comment>
  Zero or more comments containing sub product information, for example.

Examples

Firefox UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X x.y; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0

Chrome UA string:

The Chrome (or Chromium/blink-based engines) user agent string is similar to the Firefox format. For compatibility, it adds strings like "KHTML, like Gecko" and "Safari".

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36

Safari UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.1.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14E304 Safari/602.1

Internet Explorer UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0)
J0ANMM
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5

User Agent string provide information on application type, operating system, software vendor / version and layout rendering engine.

Depending on browser you would also get additional information. IE provides Feature Tokens that contains information about .NET runtime versions. You can learn more about IE specific tokens here - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503(v=vs.85).aspx

Not sure if you would need this but will surely help to understand how user agent strings are decoded - http://www.texsoft.it/index.php?c=software&m=sw.php.useragent&l=it

Moo3
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  • is there a way to parse any type of userAgent? – HaBo Apr 17 '13 at 20:36
  • Certainly you can. For PHP - http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-browser.php this documentation will guide you. The same question is answered [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2122786/code-to-parse-user-agent-string) – Moo3 Apr 19 '13 at 20:50