Baskerville

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the User Agent

Baskerville will sniff a user agent string and provide some analysis of what it might mean.

Installation

npm install @kmdavis/baskerville

Usage

Baskerville has 2 main methods: tokenize, and process.

Tokenize will return an array of tokens, for example:

import Baskerville from "@kmdavis/baskerville";
Baskerville.tokenize("Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.4; Linux 2.6.32-22-generic; X11; en_US) KHTML/4.4.3 (like Gecko) Kubuntu");

will return the following tokens:

[
    {
        name: "compatible",
    },
    {
        name: "en_US",
    },
    {
        name: "KHTML",
        version: "4.4.3",
        like: "Gecko",
    },
    {
        name: "Konqueror",
        version: "4.4",
    },
    {
        name: "Kubuntu",
    },
    {
        name: "Linux",
        version: "2.6.32-22-generic",
    },
    {
        name: "Mozilla",
        version: "5.0",
    },
    {
        name: "X",
        version: "11",
    },
]

Process takes that array of tokens and does a little... processing... on it.

Baskerville.process("Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.4; Linux 2.6.32-22-generic; X11; en_US) KHTML/4.4.3 (like Gecko) Kubuntu");

will return:

[
    {
        name: "compatible",
    },
    {
        name: "en_US",
    },
    {
        type: "browser",
        name: "KHTML",
        version: "4.4.3",
        like: "Gecko",
    },
    {
        type: "browser",
        name: "Konqueror",
        version: "4.4",
    },
    {
        type: "os",
        name: "Kubuntu",
    },
    {
        type: "os",
        name: "Linux",
        version: "2.6.32-22-generic",
    },
    {
        type: "browser",
        name: "Mozilla",
        version: "5.0",
    },
    {
        name: "X",
        version: "11",
    },
]

The built-in processing is rather minimal: it will normalize version strings (replacing underscores with dots), identify browsers and operating systems, and the "security token" (N, U, or I). For additional processing, we expose a registerProcessor method that allows you to create a processor plugin. For example, you could use this to sort browsers or operating systems into buckets, like mobile vs desktop, linux-based, etc. You could also use it to convert our string versions into Version objects:

Baskerville.registerProcessor(function wrapVersions (token) {
    if (token.version) {
        token.version = new Version(token.version);
    }
});

Or you could parse the locale token ("en_US" in the example above):

var carmen = require("@kmdavis/carmen"); // https://github.com/kmdavis/carmen
Baskerville.registerProcessor(function identifyLocale (token) {
    var locale = carmen.parse(token.name); // will return undefined if it can't parse
    if (locale) {
        token.type = "locale";
        token.details = locale;
        return true; // We assume full ownership and responsibility for this token.
    }
    return false; // Let the other children play
});

In the example above, if a processor returns true, no further processing will be performed on that token. Also, don't be scared to modify the token, you're not modifying the original token, but rather a copy. The token or array of tokens passed into baskerville.process is not modified in any way.

Development setup

npm install
npm test

Release History

• 0.1.0
  • Initial public release
• 0.2.0
  • Rewrite using modern javascript
• 0.2.1
  • Removed unnecessary (boilerplate) dependencies
  • Added a test using large numbers of randomly generated useragent strings
• 0.2.2
  • Updating README
• 0.2.3
  • Removing an unused rc file
• 0.2.4
  • Fixing a licensing issue
• 0.2.5
  • Switching to webpack
• 0.2.6
  • Updating readme

Meta

Kevan Davis [email protected]

Distributed under the MIT license.

https://github.com/kmdavis/baskerville

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/kmdavis/baskerville/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/fooBar)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some fooBar')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/fooBar)
5. Create a new Pull Request