Parse 'User-Agent' Strings.

uaparserjs

Parse ‘User-Agent’ Strings

Description

Despite there being a section in RFC 7231 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231#section-5.5.3 defining a suggested structure for ‘User-Agent’ headers this data is notoriously difficult to parse consistently. Tools are provided that will take in user agent strings and return structured R objects. This is a ‘V8’-backed package based on the ‘ua-parser’ project https://github.com/ua-parser.

NOTE: there is a C++-backed R package but it has issues compiling on a few platforms and is dependent upon Boost regex. This version is definitely slower but it works on all platforms.

What’s Inside The Tin

The following functions are implemented:

• ua_parse: Parse a vector of user agents into a data frame

Installation

install.packages("uaparserjs")

Usage

library(uaparserjs)

# current version
packageVersion("uaparserjs")
## [1] '0.3.5'

dplyr::glimpse(ua_parse("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.10 Chromium/15.0.874.106 Chrome/15.0.874.106 Safari/535.2"))
## Rows: 1
## Columns: 9
## $ userAgent     <chr> "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.10 Chromium/15…
## $ ua.family     <chr> "Chromium"
## $ ua.major      <chr> "15"
## $ ua.minor      <chr> "0"
## $ ua.patch      <chr> "874"
## $ os.family     <chr> "Ubuntu"
## $ os.major      <chr> "11"
## $ os.minor      <chr> "10"
## $ device.family <chr> "Other"

agents <- readLines(system.file("extdat", "agents.txt", package = "uaparserjs"))

dplyr::glimpse(ua_parse(agents))
## Rows: 1,091
## Columns: 13
## $ userAgent     <chr> "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/531.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) AdobeAIR/2.5.1", "Mozill…
## $ ua.family     <chr> "AdobeAIR", "Amazon Silk", "Amazon Silk", "Amazon Silk", "Amazon Silk", "Amazon Silk", "Android…
## $ ua.major      <chr> "2", "1", "2", "2", "2", "3", "2", "2", "2", "2", "3", "4", "4", "4", "4", "1", "1", "6", "7", …
## $ ua.minor      <chr> "5", "1", "0", "1", "2", "25", "2", "3", "3", "3", "0", "0", "0", "0", "0", NA, NA, "13", "6", …
## $ ua.patch      <chr> "1", "0-80", NA, NA, NA, NA, "2", "3", "4", "5", "1", "3", "3", "3", "4", NA, NA, "13719", "214…
## $ os.family     <chr> "Windows", "Android", "Android", "Android", "Android", "Android", "Android", "Android", "Androi…
## $ device.family <chr> "Other", "Kindle", "Kindle Fire HD", "Kindle Fire", "Kindle Fire HD", "Kindle Fire HD", "HTC De…
## $ device.brand  <chr> NA, "Amazon", "Amazon", "Amazon", "Amazon", "Amazon", "HTC", "HTC", "Amazon", "Tecno", "Samsung…
## $ device.model  <chr> NA, "Kindle", "Kindle Fire HD 7\"", "Kindle Fire", "Kindle Fire HD 7\"", "Kindle Fire HD 7\"", …
## $ os.major      <chr> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "4", "2", "2", "2", "2", "3", "4", "4", "4", "4", "7", "7", "XP", "8", "4",…
## $ os.minor      <chr> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "0", "2", "3", "3", "3", "0", "0", "0", "0", "0", NA, NA, NA, NA, "1", "0",…
## $ os.patch      <chr> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, "3", "2", "3", "4", "5", "1", "3", "3", "3", "4", NA, NA, NA, NA, "1", "6",…
## $ os.patchMinor <chr> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,…

set.seed(100)
batch_100 <- sample(agents, 100)
microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
  ua_parse(batch_100)
)
## Unit: milliseconds
##                 expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
##  ua_parse(batch_100) 708.7338 721.5558 737.8894 730.8626 742.9891 928.1393   100