server-side browser detection? node.js

Question

Most implementations i\'ve seen are for browser detection on the client side. I was just wondering if it was possible to do browser detection before sending any resources to

Answer 1

var ua = request.headers['user-agent'],
    $ = {};

if (/mobile/i.test(ua))
    $.Mobile = true;

if (/like Mac OS X/.test(ua)) {
    $.iOS = /CPU( iPhone)? OS ([0-9\._]+) like Mac OS X/.exec(ua)[2].replace(/_/g, '.');
    $.iPhone = /iPhone/.test(ua);
    $.iPad = /iPad/.test(ua);
}

if (/Android/.test(ua))
    $.Android = /Android ([0-9\.]+)[\);]/.exec(ua)[1];

if (/webOS\//.test(ua))
    $.webOS = /webOS\/([0-9\.]+)[\);]/.exec(ua)[1];

if (/(Intel|PPC) Mac OS X/.test(ua))
    $.Mac = /(Intel|PPC) Mac OS X ?([0-9\._]*)[\)\;]/.exec(ua)[2].replace(/_/g, '.') || true;

if (/Windows NT/.test(ua))
    $.Windows = /Windows NT ([0-9\._]+)[\);]/.exec(ua)[1];

That should work for you. Just put it in your response handler.

Answer 2

Here's another one: https://github.com/koudelka/node-useragent_parser

Answer 3

Powerfull npm useragent. Useragent allows you to parse user agent string with high accuracy by using hand tuned dedicated regular expressions for browser matching. This database is needed to ensure that every browser is correctly parsed as every browser vendor implements it's own user agent schema. This is why regular user agent parsers have major issues because they will most likely parse out the wrong browser name or confuse the render engine version with the actual version of the browser.

Answer 4

ua = request.headers['user-agent'];
if( /firefox/i.test(ua) )
  browser = 'firefox';
else if( /chrome/i.test(ua) )
  browser = 'chrome';
else if( /safari/i.test(ua) )
  browser = 'safari';
else if( /msie/i.test(ua) )
  browser = 'msie';
else
  browser = 'unknown';

Answer 5

I improved a bit @duck5auce's code to be actually useful and support IE 10-12 (Edge).

var getDevice = function(ua) {
    var $ = {active: false, subactive: false};

    if (/mobile/i.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'mobile';
        $.Mobile = true;
    }

    if (/like Mac OS X/.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'iOS';
        $.iOS = /CPU( iPhone)? OS ([0-9\._]+) like Mac OS X/.exec(ua)[2].replace(/_/g, '.');
        if (/like Mac OS X/.test(ua)) {
            $.subactive = 'iPhone';
            $.iPhone = /iPhone/.test(ua);
        }
        if (/like Mac OS X/.test(ua)) {
            $.subactive = 'iPad';
            $.iPad = /iPad/.test(ua);
        }
    }

    if (/Android/.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'Android';
        $.Android = /Android ([0-9\.]+)[\);]/.exec(ua)[1];
    }

    if (/webOS\//.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'webOS';
        $.webOS = /webOS\/([0-9\.]+)[\);]/.exec(ua)[1];
    }

    if (/(Intel|PPC) Mac OS X/.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'Safari';
        $.Safari = /(Intel|PPC) Mac OS X ?([0-9\._]*)[\)\;]/.exec(ua)[2].replace(/_/g, '.') || true;
    }

    if (/Windows NT/.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'IE';
        $.IE = /Windows NT ([0-9\._]+)[\);]/.exec(ua)[1];
    }
    if (/MSIE/.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'IE';
        $.IE = /MSIE ([0-9]+[\.0-9]*)/.exec(ua)[1];
    }
    if (/Trident/.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'IE';
        $.IE = /Trident\/.*rv:([0-9]+[\.0-9]*)/.exec(ua)[1];
    }
    if (/Edge\/\d+/.test(ua)) {
        $.active = 'IE Edge';
        $.IE = /Edge\/(\d+)/.exec(ua)[1];
    }

    return $.active + ' ' + $[$.active] + ($.subactive && ' ' + $.subactive + ' ' + $[$.subactive]);
};

Answer 6

I released device-detector-js a couple months ago.

It's a TypeScript port of Matomo device-detector, a powerful device detection library originally written in PHP.

It can parse any user agent and detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.

Installation

npm install device-detector-js

Example - simple user agent detection:

const DeviceDetector = require("device-detector-js");

const deviceDetector = new DeviceDetector();
const userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.81 Safari/537.36";
const device = deviceDetector.parse(userAgent);

console.log(device);

Take a look at the full API documentation.