user-agents-ng

A maintained, drop-in successor to user-agents. The original selwin/python-user-agents has had no release since 2020. user-agents-ng picks up where it left off: modern packaging, type hints, and tested support for Python 3.9–3.14. The import stays the same (from user_agents import parse) — just change what you pip install.

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.

Installation

user-agents-ng is hosted on PyPI and can be installed with:

pip install user-agents-ng

Migrating from user-agents

user-agents-ng is a drop-in replacement. Swap the dependency and your code keeps working unchanged:

pip uninstall user-agents
pip install user-agents-ng

fromuser_agentsimportparse# <- unchanged

Usage

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

fromuser_agentsimportparse# iPhone's user agent stringua_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 attributesuser_agent.browser# returns Browser(family='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 propertiesuser_agent.os# returns OperatingSystem(family='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 propertiesuser_agent.device# returns Device(family='iPhone', brand='Apple', model='iPhone')user_agent.device.family# returns 'iPhone'user_agent.device.brand# returns 'Apple'user_agent.device.model# returns 'iPhone'# Viewing a pretty string versionstr(user_agent) # returns "iPhone / iOS 5.1 / Mobile Safari 5.1"

user_agents also exposes a few other more "sophisticated" attributes that are derived from one or more basic attributes defined above. 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:

fromuser_agentsimportparse# Let's start from an old, non touch Blackberry deviceua_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 Trueuser_agent.is_tablet# returns Falseuser_agent.is_touch_capable# returns Falseuser_agent.is_pc# returns Falseuser_agent.is_bot# returns Falsestr(user_agent) # returns "BlackBerry 9700 / BlackBerry OS 5 / BlackBerry 9700"# Now a Samsung Galaxy S3ua_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 Trueuser_agent.is_tablet# returns Falseuser_agent.is_touch_capable# returns Trueuser_agent.is_pc# returns Falseuser_agent.is_bot# returns Falsestr(user_agent) # returns "Samsung GT-I9300 / Android 4.0.4 / Android 4.0.4"# Touch capable Windows 8 deviceua_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 Falseuser_agent.is_tablet# returns Falseuser_agent.is_touch_capable# returns Trueuser_agent.is_pc# returns Trueuser_agent.is_bot# returns Falsestr(user_agent) # returns "PC / Windows 8 / IE 10"

Running Tests

python -m unittest user_agents.tests

Changelog

Version 3.0.0

• Released as user-agents-ng, a maintained successor to user-agents.
• Tested support for Python 3.9–3.14; dropped Python 2.
• Migrated packaging to pyproject.toml; added py.typed and type hints.
• Replaced Travis CI with GitHub Actions (Linux + Windows).

For the pre-3.0 history, see the original project changelog.

Credits

Originally created by Selwin Ong and the team at Stamps. Maintained as user-agents-ng by Saif Ali. Licensed under the MIT License.