HTTP::BrowserDetect - Determine Web browser, version, and platform from an HTTP user agent string

version 3.41

use HTTP::BrowserDetect ();

my $user_agent_string
    = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36';
my $ua = HTTP::BrowserDetect->new($user_agent_string);

# Print general information
print 'Browser: ' . $ua->browser_string . "\n" if $ua->browser_string;
print 'Version: ' . $ua->browser_version . $ua->browser_beta . "\n" if $ua->browser_version;
print 'OS: ' . $ua->os_string . "\n" if $ua->os_string;

# Detect operating system
if ( $ua->windows ) {
    if ( $ua->winnt ) {
        # do something
    }
    if ( $ua->win95 ) {
        # do something
    }
}
print "Mac\n" if $ua->macosx;

# Detect browser vendor and version
print "Safari\n" if $ua->safari;
print "MSIE\n" if $ua->ie;
print "Mobile\n" if $ua->mobile;
if ( $ua->browser_major(4) ) {
    if ( $ua->browser_minor > .5 ) {
        # ...;
    }
}
if ( $ua->browser_version > 4.5 ) {
    # ...;
}

The HTTP::BrowserDetect object does a number of tests on an HTTP user agent string. The results of these tests are available via methods of the object.

For an online demonstration of this module's parsing, you can check out https://www.browserdetect.org/

This module was originally based upon the JavaScript browser detection code available at http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/browser_type.html.

HTTP::BrowserDetect->new( $user_agent_string )

The constructor may be called with a user agent string specified. Otherwise, it will use the value specified by $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'}, which is set by the web server when calling a CGI script.

Returns the browser, as one of the following values:

chrome, firefox, ie, opera, safari, adm, applecoremedia, blackberry, brave, browsex, dalvik, elinks, links, lynx, emacs, epiphany, galeon, konqueror, icab, lotusnotes, mosaic, mozilla, netfront, netscape, n3ds, dsi, obigo, polaris, pubsub, realplayer, seamonkey, silk, staroffice, ucbrowser, webtv, samsung

If the browser could not be identified (either because unrecognized or because it is a robot), returns undef.

Returns a human formatted version of the browser name. These names are subject to change and are meant for display purposes. This may include information additional to what's in browser() (e.g. distinguishing Firefox from Iceweasel).

If the user agent could not be identified, or if it was identified as a robot instead, returns undef.

Please note that that the version(), major() and minor() methods have been deprecated as of release 1.78 of this module. They should be replaced with browser_version(), browser_major(), browser_minor(), and browser_beta().

The reasoning behind this is that version() method will, in the case of Safari, return the Safari/XXX numbers even when Version/XXX numbers are present in the UserAgent string (i.e. it will return incorrect versions for Safari in some cases).

Returns the browser version (major and minor) as a string. For example, for Chrome 36.0.1985.67, this returns "36.0".

Returns the major part of the version as a string. For example, for Chrome 36.0.1985.67, this returns "36".

Returns undef if no version information can be detected.

Returns the minor part of the version as a string. This includes the decimal point; for example, for Chrome 36.0.1985.67, this returns ".0".

Returns undef if no version information can be detected.

Returns any part of the version after the major and minor version, as a string. For example, for Chrome 36.0.1985.67, this returns ".1985.67". The beta part of the string can contain any type of alphanumeric characters.

Returns undef if no version information can be detected. Returns an empty string if version information is detected but it contains only a major and minor version with nothing following.

Returns one of the following strings, or undef:

windows, winphone, mac, macosx, linux, android, ios, os2, unix, vms,
chromeos, firefoxos, ps3, psp, rimtabletos, blackberry, amiga, brew

Returns a human formatted version of the OS name. These names are subject to change and are really meant for display purposes. This may include information additional to what's in os() (e.g. distinguishing various editions of Windows from one another) (although for a way to do that that's more suitable for use in program logic, see below under "OS related properties").

Returns undef if no OS information could be detected.

Returns version information for the OS, if any could be detected. The format is the same as for the browser_version() functions.

Returns true if the browser appears to belong to a mobile phone or similar device (i.e. one small enough that the mobile version of a page is probably preferable over the desktop version).

In previous versions, tablet devices sometimes had mobile() return true. They are now mutually exclusive.

Returns true if the browser appears to belong to a tablet device.

Returns the type of mobile / tablet hardware, if it can be detected.

Currently returns one of: android, audrey, avantgo, blackberry, dsi, iopener, ipad, iphone, ipod, kindle, n3ds, palm, ps3, psp, wap, webos, winphone.

Returns undef if this is not a tablet/mobile device or no hardware information can be detected.

Returns a human formatted version of the hardware device name. These names are subject to change and are really meant for display purposes. You should use the device() method in your logic. This may include additional information (such as the model of phone if it is detectable).

Returns undef if this is not a portable device or if no device name can be detected.

If the user agent appears to be a robot, spider, crawler, or other automated Web client, this returns one of the following values:

lwp, slurp, yahoo, bingbot, msnmobile, msn, msoffice, ahrefs, altavista, apache, askjeeves, baidu, curl, facebook, getright, googleadsbot, googleadsense, googlebotimage, googlebotnews, googlebotvideo, googlefavicon, googlemobile, google, golib, indy, infoseek, ipsagent, linkchecker, linkexchange, lycos, malware, mj12bot, nutch, phplib, puf, rubylib, scooter, specialarchiver, wget, yandexbot, yandeximages, java, headlesschrome, amazonbot, unknown

Returns "unknown" when the user agent is believed to be a robot but is not identified as one of the above specific robots.

Returns undef if the user agent is not a robot or cannot be identified.

Note that if a robot crafts a user agent designed to impersonate a particular browser, we generally set properties appropriate to both the actual robot, and the browser it is impersonating. For example, googlebot-mobile pretends to be mobile safari so that it will get mobile versions of pages. In this case, browser() will return 'safari', the properties will generally be set as if for Mobile Safari, the 'robot' property will be set, and robot() will return 'googlemobile'.

Returns true if the user agent appears to be an HTTP library or tool (e.g. LWP, curl, wget, java). Generally libraries are also classified as robots, although it is impossible to tell whether they are being operated by an automated system or a human.

Returns a human formatted version of the robot name. These names are subject to change and are meant for display purposes. This may include additional information (e.g. robots which return "unknown" from robot() generally can be identified in a human-readable fashion by reading robot_string() ).

This method is currently in beta.

Returns an id consisting of lower case letters, numbers and dashes. This id will remain constant, so you can use it for matching against a particular robot. The ids were introduced in version 3.14. There may still be a few corrections to ids in subsequent releases. Once this method becomes stable the ids will also be frozen.

This method returns an ArrayRef of all possible robot_id values.

Returns version information for the robot, if any could be detected. The format is the same as for the browser_version() functions.

Note that if a robot crafts a user agent designed to impersonate a particular browser, we generally return results appropriate to both the actual robot, and the browser it is impersonating. For example, googlebot-mobile pretends to be mobile safari so that it will get mobile versions of pages. In this case, robot_version() will return the version of googlebot-mobile, and browser_version() will return the version of Safari that googlebot-mobile is impersonating.

Operating systems, devices, browser names, rendering engines, and true-or-false methods (e.g. "mobile" and "lib") are all browser properties. For example, calling browser_properties() for Mobile Safari running on an Android will return this list:

('android', 'device', 'mobile', 'mobile_safari', 'safari', 'webkit')

Returns all properties for this user agent, as a list. Note that because a large number of cases must be considered, this will take significantly more time than simply querying the particular methods you care about.

A mostly complete list of properties follows (i.e. each of these methods is both a method you can call, and also a property that may be in the list returned by browser_properties() ). In addition to this list, robot(), lib(), device(), mobile(), and tablet() are all browser properties.

The following methods are available, each returning a true or false value. Some methods also test for the operating system version. The indentations below show the hierarchy of tests (for example, win2k is considered a type of winnt, which is a type of win32)

win16 win3x win31
win32
    winme win95 win98
    winnt
        win2k winxp win2k3 winvista win7
        win8
            win8_0 win8_1
        win10
            win10_0
wince
winphone
    winphone7 winphone7_5 winphone8 winphone10

mac68k macppc macosx ios

sun sun4 sun5 suni86 irix irix5 irix6 hpux hpux9 hpux10
aix aix1 aix2 aix3 aix4 linux sco unixware mpras reliant
dec sinix freebsd bsd

It may not be possible to detect Win98 in Netscape 4.x and earlier. On Opera 3.0, the userAgent string includes "Windows 95/NT4" on all Win32, so you can't distinguish between Win95 and WinNT.

The following methods are available, each returning a true or false value. Some methods also test for the browser version, saving you from checking the version separately.

The ie_compat_mode is used to determine if the IE user agent is for the compatibility mode view, in which case the real version of IE is higher than that detected. The true version of IE can be inferred from the version of Trident in the engine_version method.

The realplayer method above tests for the presence of either the RealPlayer plug-in "(r1 " or the browser "RealPlayer".

The realplayer_browser method tests for the presence of the RealPlayer browser (but returns 0 for the plugin).

Netscape 6, even though it's called six, in the User-Agent string has version number 5. The nav6 and nav6up methods correctly handle this quirk. The Firefox test correctly detects the older-named versions of the browser (Phoenix, Firebird).

The following methods are available, each returning a true or false value.

Note that 'wap' indicates that the device is capable of WAP, not necessarily that the device is limited to WAP only. Most modern WAP devices are also capable of rendering standard HTML.

These methods are now deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the robot() and robot_id() methods to identify the bots. Use robot_id() if you need to match on a string, since the value that is returned by robot could possibly change in a future release.

The following additional methods are available, each returning a true or false value. This is by no means a complete list of robots that exist on the Web.

The following properties indicate if a particular rendering engine is being used.

Returns the value of the user agent string.

Calling this method with a parameter to set the user agent has now been removed; please use HTTP::BrowserDetect->new() to pass the user agent string.

Returns true if this browser and version are known to support Universal Second Factor (U2F). This method will need future updates as more browsers fully support this standard.

Returns the country string as it may be found in the user agent string. This will be in the form of an upper case 2 character code. ie: US, DE, etc

Returns the language string as it is found in the user agent string. This will be in the form of an upper case 2 character code. ie: EN, DE, etc

Returns the rendering engine, one of the following:

gecko, webkit, khtml, trident, ie, presto, netfront

Note that this returns "webkit" for webkit based browsers (including Chrome/Blink). This is a change from previous versions of this library, which returned "KHTML" for webkit.

Returns undef if none of the above rendering engines can be detected.

Returns a human formatted version of the rendering engine.

Note that this returns "WebKit" for webkit based browsers (including Chrome/Blink). This is a change from previous versions of this library, which returned "KHTML" for webkit.

Returns undef if none of the known rendering engines can be detected.

Returns version information for the rendering engine, if any could be detected. The format is the same as for the browser_version() functions.

Deprecated alternate name for device_string()

This is probably not what you want. Please use either browser_version() or engine_version() instead.

Returns the version (major and minor) as a string.

This function returns wrong values for some Safari versions, for compatibility with earlier code. browser_version() returns correct version numbers for Safari.

This is probably not what you want. Please use either browser_major() or engine_major() instead.

Returns the integer portion of the browser version as a string.

This function returns wrong values for some Safari versions, for compatibility with earlier code. browser_version() returns correct version numbers for Safari.

This is probably not what you want. Please use either browser_minor() or engine_minor() instead.

Returns the decimal portion of the browser version as a string.

This function returns wrong values for some Safari versions, for compatibility with earlier code. browser_version() returns correct version numbers for Safari.

This is probably not what you want. Please use browser_beta() instead.

Returns the beta version, consisting of any characters after the major and minor version number, as a string.

This function returns wrong values for some Safari versions, for compatibility with earlier code. browser_version() returns correct version numbers for Safari.

Deprecated. Please use browser_version() and related functions instead.

If a Gecko rendering engine is used (as in Mozilla or Firefox), returns the engine version. If no Gecko browser is being used, or the version number can't be detected, returns undef.

This is an old function, preserved for compatibility; please use engine_version() in new code.

Lee Semel, lee@semel.net (Original Author)

Peter Walsham (co-maintainer)

Olaf Alders, olaf at wundercounter.com (co-maintainer)

Thanks to the following for their contributions:

cho45

Leonardo Herrera

Denis F. Latypoff

merlynkline

Simon Waters

Toni Cebrin

Florian Merges

david.hilton.p

Steve Purkis

Andrew McGregor

Robin Smidsrod

Richard Noble

Josh Ritter

Mike Clarke

Marc Sebastian Pelzer

Alexey Surikov

Maros Kollar

Jay Rifkin

Luke Saunders

Jacob Rask

Heiko Weber

Jon Jensen

Jesse Thompson

Graham Barr

Enrico Sorcinelli

Olivier Bilodeau

Yoshiki Kurihara

Paul Findlay

Uwe Voelker

Douglas Christopher Wilson

John Oatis

Atsushi Kato

Ronald J. Kimball

Bill Rhodes

Thom Blake

Aran Deltac

yeahoffline

David Ihnen

Hao Wu

Perlover

Daniel Stadie

ben hengst

Andrew Moise

Atsushi Kato

Marco Fontani

Nicolas Doye

POD coverage is not 100%.

"Browser ID (User-Agent) Strings", http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/browser_ids.htm

HTML::ParseBrowser.

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc HTTP::BrowserDetect

You can also look for information at:

• GitHub Source Repository

  https://github.com/oalders/http-browserdetect

• Reporting Issues

  https://github.com/oalders/http-browserdetect/issues

• Search CPAN

  https://metacpan.org/module/HTTP::BrowserDetect

Patches are certainly welcome, with many thanks for the excellent contributions which have already been received. The preferred method of patching would be to fork the GitHub repo and then send a pull request.

Please include a test case as this will speed up the time to release your changes. Just edit t/useragents.json so that the test coverage includes any changes you have made. Please open a GitHub issue if you have any questions.

• Lee Semel lee@semel.net
• Peter Walsham
• Olaf Alders olaf@wundercounter.com (current maintainer)

This software is copyright (c) 1999 by Lee Semel.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.