Introducing UA-Extract: Simplify User Agent Parsing and Keep Your Device Detection Up-to-Date

In today’s fast-evolving digital landscape, accurately identifying users’ browsers, operating systems, and devices is essential for web analytics, personalization, and debugging. Traditional user agent parsers often struggle to stay current with new devices and browsers, requiring manual updates that can be tedious and error-prone. To address this challenge, we present UA-Extract—a robust Python library crafted to streamline user agent analysis while ensuring your regex patterns are always up-to-date effortlessly.

What is UA-Extract?

UA-Extract is a high-performance Python toolkit designed to decode user agent strings with remarkable accuracy. Built upon the reliable foundation of the device_detector library, it harnesses an extensive, regularly maintained database of device and browser signatures. The standout feature? Its intuitive mechanisms for updating regex patterns with minimal effort, guaranteeing your detection capabilities remain current without manual digging through complex code or repositories.

Core Features and Benefits

• Effortless Regex Maintenance: Keep your detection algorithms up-to-date with a simple line of code or a straightforward CLI command. UA-Extract fetches the latest regexes directly from the comprehensive Matomo Device Detector project, supporting the detection of even the most obscure devices and browsers.

• Fast and Reliable Parsing: Optimize performance with in-memory caching and optional support for the regex module, enabling rapid analysis of large volumes of user agent strings.

• Flexible Detection Options: Whether you need detailed device information or just the essential OS and app details, UA-Extract provides modes like SoftwareDetector for speed-focused scenarios, skipping hardware-specific detections.

Practical Usage Examples

Updating regex patterns effortlessly:

python
from ua_extract import Regexes
Regexes().update_regexes() # Fetch latest patterns

Or via command line:

bash
ua_extract update_regexes

Parsing user agent strings for detailed info:

“`python
from ua_extract import DeviceDetector

ua_string = ‘Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_1_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/16D57 EtsyInc/5.22 rv:52200.62.0’
detector = DeviceDetector(ua_string).parse()
print(detector.os_name()) # Output: iOS
print(detector.device_model()) # Output: iPhone
print(det