useragent

Extract available browser, device, and OS version information from the user agent string.

(While it is better to do feature detection when we can, sadly sometimes we need to fall back on looking at version numbers to avoid particular browser or device bugs).

The intent and purpose of this package is to return the same information on both the client and the server.

Thus this package is by design limited to information available in just the user agent string. On the client often more information can be obtained about the runtime environment... but, since that's not available on the server, it's left to other client packages to make additional client information available.

Version

0.0.1

This package supports Meteor 0.6.5 and above.

Based on 3rd-Eden/useragent version 2.0.7.

User agent description

The user agent description object returned by the API is a plain JavaScript value object, containing browser, os, and device fields.

Each contains family, major, minor, and patch, when available from the user agent string. The family is a string in camel case (for example, "mobileSafari"); while major, minor, and patch can either be integers or occasionally strings (such as "beta").

For example, here is Chrome for iOS running on an iPad:

{
  browser: { family: 'chromeMobileIOS', major: 27, minor: 0, patch: 1453 },
  os: { family: 'ios', major: 5, minor: 1, patch: 1 },
  device: { family: 'ipad' }
}

Notice how we can distinguish between the operating system (iOS 5.1.1) and the device the OS is running on (an iPad).

While here is Chrome running on Ubuntu:

{
  browser: { family: 'chromium', major: 28, minor: 0, patch: 1500 },
  os: { family: 'ubuntu' },
  device: {}
}

Less OS and device information is present in this user agent string. (We get what the browser gives us).

API

parseUseragent

parseUseragent(userAgent) anywhere

Parses the passed user agent string and returns the user agent description.

On the server in a connect handler, the user agent string can be found in req.headers['user-agent'].

Useragent

Useragent client

A user agent description object, created from window.navigator.userAgent.

TODO

• Parse results on the server could be cached.

• On the standard Meteor stack (which serves the app HTML dynamically), the parsed user agent info could be passed back to the client from the server instead of shipping the parsing code to the client.

Support

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