How to Parse a User Agent in PHP with Minimal Effort

Articles in Server-Side | By August R. Garcia

Published 3 years agoThu, 27 Dec 2018 18:59:36 -0800 | Last Update 3 years agoSun, 30 Dec 2018 19:16:59 -0800

Is it a ghetto hack or a quality post?

9,385 views, 1 RAM, and 1 comment

Code for the PHP User Agent Parser Function
Tested on These 142 User Agents
FAQ and Common Issues with User Agent Parsing in PHP
What is browscap.ini?
Solving "WARNING get_browser(): browscap ini directive not set on line number 2"
Are there better/"better" ways to extract browser information from user agents and/or to generally parse user agents in PHP?

User agents contain a substantial amount of data stored in a string of text. Also, literally anyone can set random, arbitrary, non-standard user agent strings for their browser and/or on requests made by their bots. Because of this, parsing and extracting information from these user agents can be more complex than might be expected, and can require intricate solutions that are designed to handle thousands of edge cases.

But, fuck all of that shit. You can just copy paste this PHP function and it will basically work fine.

Borat-Very-Nice.mp4

Code for the PHP User Agent Parser Function

Here is some code. It is an extension of the code in Francesco R's post from 2016 on the PHP documentation page for get_browser:

http://us1.php.net/manual/en/function.get-browser.php#119332

There are two major updates:

While the code in Francesco R's original post works accurately for the vast majority of human cases. If you need to handle bot traffic, additional lines are needed.
The original post contained a bug related to the strpos() function (see the comment shown in code)

// Function written and tested December, 2018
function get_browser_name($user_agent)
{
        // Make case insensitive.
        $t = strtolower($user_agent);

        // If the string *starts* with the string, strpos returns 0 (i.e., FALSE). Do a ghetto hack and start with a space.
        // "[strpos()] may return Boolean FALSE, but may also return a non-Boolean value which evaluates to FALSE."
        //    http://php.net/manual/en/function.strpos.php
        $t = " " . $t;

        // Humans / Regular Users      
        if     (strpos($t, 'opera'     ) || strpos($t, 'opr/')     ) return 'Opera'            ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'edge'      )                           ) return 'Edge'             ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'chrome'    )                           ) return 'Chrome'           ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'safari'    )                           ) return 'Safari'           ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'firefox'   )                           ) return 'Firefox'          ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'msie'      ) || strpos($t, 'trident/7')) return 'Internet Explorer';

        // Search Engines  
        elseif (strpos($t, 'google'    )                           ) return '[Bot] Googlebot'   ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'bing'      )                           ) return '[Bot] Bingbot'     ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'slurp'     )                           ) return '[Bot] Yahoo! Slurp';
        elseif (strpos($t, 'duckduckgo')                           ) return '[Bot] DuckDuckBot' ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'baidu'     )                           ) return '[Bot] Baidu'       ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'yandex'    )                           ) return '[Bot] Yandex'      ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'sogou'     )                           ) return '[Bot] Sogou'       ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'exabot'    )                           ) return '[Bot] Exabot'      ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'msn'       )                           ) return '[Bot] MSN'         ;

        // Common Tools and Bots
        elseif (strpos($t, 'mj12bot'   )                           ) return '[Bot] Majestic'     ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'ahrefs'    )                           ) return '[Bot] Ahrefs'       ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'semrush'   )                           ) return '[Bot] SEMRush'      ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'rogerbot'  ) || strpos($t, 'dotbot')   ) return '[Bot] Moz or OpenSiteExplorer';
        elseif (strpos($t, 'frog'      ) || strpos($t, 'screaming')) return '[Bot] Screaming Frog';
        elseif (strpos($t, 'blex'      )                           ) return '[Bot] BLEXBot'       ;
        
        // Miscellaneous 
        elseif (strpos($t, 'facebook'  )                           ) return '[Bot] Facebook'     ;
        elseif (strpos($t, 'pinterest' )                           ) return '[Bot] Pinterest'    ;
        
        // Check for strings commonly used in bot user agents   
        elseif (strpos($t, 'crawler' ) || strpos($t, 'api'    ) ||
                strpos($t, 'spider'  ) || strpos($t, 'http'   ) ||
                strpos($t, 'bot'     ) || strpos($t, 'archive') || 
                strpos($t, 'info'    ) || strpos($t, 'data'   )    ) return '[Bot] Other'   ;
        
        return 'Other (Unknown)';
}

Tested on These 142 User Agents

The function above was tested with the following 142 common bot and human user agents and all are classified by the function.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36 Edge/17.17134
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_1) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.1 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_2) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.2 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.1 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 12_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.2 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36 OPR/56.0.3051.116
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 YaBrowser/18.10.2.163 Yowser/2.5 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 YaBrowser/18.10.2.163 Yowser/2.5 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.17763
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.1.2 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/71.0.3578.80 Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.80 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36 Edge/16.16299
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.106 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/70.0.3538.77 Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.67 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.1 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0.2 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.1.2 Safari/605.1.15
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp;    http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.5;    http://www.majestic12.co.uk/bot.php?+)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/5.2; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp/3.0;    http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.7;    http://mj12bot.com/)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)
msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.8;    http://mj12bot.com/)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/5.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1;    http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Googlebot-Image/1.0
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/5.1; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)
Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1) VoilaBot BETA 1.2 (support.voilabot@orange-ftgroup.com)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1;    http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/, crawler@dotnetdotcom.org)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b
msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot/0.3 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1) VoilaBot BETA 1.2 (http://www.voila.com/)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 95) VoilaBot BETA 1.2 (http://www.voila.com/)
YahooMailProxy;    https://help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-mail-proxy-SLN28749.html
Yahoo-MMCrawler/3.x (mms dash mmcrawler dash support at yahoo dash inc dot com)
FAST Enterprise Crawler 6 / Scirus scirus-crawler@fast.no;    http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/contactus/
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.75 Safari/537.36 Google Favicon
FAST MetaWeb Crawler (helpdesk at fastsearch dot com)
msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Pinterest/0.2 (+http://www.pinterest.com/)
ia_archiver
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot/1.0; +http://duckduckgo.com)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Exabot/3.0; +http://www.exabot.com/go/robot)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Charlotte/1.1;    http://www.searchme.com/support/)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BecomeBot/3.0; +http://www.become.com/site_owners.html)
Mediapartners-Google
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Pinterestbot/1.0; +http://www.pinterest.com/bot.html)

The results can be seen in this table:

Browser	Number of Matches	Percent of All
Chrome	51	35.92%
Firefox	26	18.31%
Edge	3	2.11%
Safari	14	9.86%
Internet Explorer	5	3.52%
Opera	1	0.70%
[Bot] Baidu	2	1.41%
[Bot] Googlebot	4	2.82%
[Bot] Yahoo! Slurp	2	1.41%
[Bot] Majestic	3	2.11%
[Bot] Bingbot	2	1.41%
[Bot] Ahrefs	3	2.11%
[Bot] MSN	8	5.63%
[Bot] Yandex	1	0.70%
[Bot] Moz or OpenSiteExplorer	2	1.41%
[Bot] Other	9	6.34%
[Bot] Pinterest	2	1.41%
[Bot] Facebook	1	0.70%
[Bot] DuckDuckBot	1	0.70%
[Bot] Exabot	1	0.70%
[Bot] Sogou	1	0.70%
-	142	100%

For general use cases that require minimal precision, this is a functional PHP get_browser() alternative.

FAQ and Common Issues with User Agent Parsing in PHP

What is browscap.ini?

The Browser Capabilities Project is "essentially a list of all known browsers and bots, along with their default capabilities and limitations." The Browser Capabilities Project distributes this information through a file named browser.ini, which is regularly updated with new user agent information. Some programming languages--including PHP--are explicitly designed to interact with this data. PHP, for example, has a function named get_browser() that depends on browsercap.ini (and requires browser.ini to be set up for the function to work; otherwise, it will raise a warning).

An excerpt of the type of data that is included in the browser.ini file is shown below:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Alexa Site Audit

[Alexa Site Audit]
Parent=DefaultProperties
Comment=Alexa Site Audit
Browser=Alexa Site Audit
Browser_Maker=Alexa Internet, Inc
Crawler=true

[Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; alexa site audit/1.0*]
Parent=Alexa Site Audit
Version=1.0
MajorVer=1

[Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; alexa site audit/*]
Parent=Alexa Site Audit

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Alexabot

[Alexabot]
Parent=DefaultProperties
Comment=Alexabot
Browser=Alexabot
Browser_Maker=Alexa Internet, Inc
Crawler=true

[Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Alexabot/1.0; *]
Parent=Alexabot
Version=1.0
MajorVer=1

[Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Alexabot/*]
Parent=Alexabot

As shown, the browscap.ini file includes a number of pieces of metadata for different user agents and is designed to be able to, ideally, provide detail on every known user agent, including obscure, obsolete/old, and uncommon user agents.

Solving "WARNING get_browser(): browscap ini directive not set on line number 2"

If PHP's get_browser() function is not working, there is a good chance that it is because of this issue. The PHP documentation for get_browser() elaborates on configuring the browsercap ini directive:

Note: In order for this to work, your browscap configuration setting in php.ini must point to the correct location of the browscap.ini file on your system. browscap.ini is not bundled with PHP, but you may find an up-to-date » php_browscap.ini file here. While browscap.ini contains information on many browsers, it relies on user updates to keep the database current. The format of the file is fairly self-explanatory.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.get-browser.php

If that is something that you want to configure, there is also a Browsecap wiki on Github. The page titled Using Browscap page covers the required information to configure and integrate Browscap into projects that use PHP, Perl, Python, ASP, and a variety of other programing languages.

Are there better/"better" ways to extract browser information from user agents and/or to generally parse user agents in PHP?

Probably. Setting up the browscap ini directive is easy enough to do and is designed to be a more complete solution.

Also, if you're analysing data that is stored in MySQL or MariaDB, it is also possible to parse the user agent and extract browser information as part of your MySQL or MariaDB query. An example of how to do this is shown in this StackOverflow thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10560082/group-user-agents-by-browser

Users Who Have Downloaded More RAM:
Hash Brown (3 years ago) 🐏 ⨉ 1Posted by August R. Garcia 3 years ago

Edit History

• [2018-12-27 18:59 PST] August R. Garcia (3 years ago)
• [2018-12-27 18:59 PST] August R. Garcia (3 years ago)
• [2018-12-27 18:59 PST] August R. Garcia (3 years ago)
• [2018-12-27 18:59 PST] August R. Garcia (3 years ago)
• [2018-12-27 18:59 PST] August R. Garcia (3 years ago)
• [2018-12-27 18:59 PST] August R. Garcia (3 years ago)
🕓 Posted at 27 December, 2018 18:59 PM PST

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Articles — More by August R. Garcia

Articles — More on Server-Side

Top↑

August R. GarciaLARPing as a Sysadmi...Portland, ORJoined 02 December, 2018Site Owner

August Garcia is some guy who used to sell Viagra on the Internet. He made this website to LARP as a sysadmin while posting about garbage like user-agent spoofing, spintax, the only good keyboard, virtual assitants from Pakistan, links with the rel="nofollow" attribute, proxies, sin, the developer console, literally every link building method, and other junk.

Available at arg@256kilobytes.com, via Twitter, or arg.256kilobytes.com. Open to business inquiries based on availability.

bboychevJoined 09 February, 2020

In my opinion you need to put the "Humans / Regular Users" ifs at the end after the bots and the rest, otherwise for example current Googlebot user agent will be not detected as "[Bot] Googlebot" but "Chrome" regular user:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Download more RAM. 🐏 ⨉ 0Posted by bboychev 2 years ago 🕓 Posted at 09 February, 2020 12:21 PM PST

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