Detecting Browsers in Python

[Fredrik Lundh]

Daniel Orner wrote:

> Does anyone know of a simple way to have a Python script find out what
> browser is accessing it? After a web search the only thing I found to
> do this is Zope, but the system I'm programming doesn't use Zope and
> I'm not really interested in installing it just for this minor detail.
> Is there another way?

if you're using a CGI script, you can (usually) find the user agent
in the HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable; use os.environ to
get the current value.

    #!/usr/bin/python -u

    import os

    print "Content-type: text/plain"
    print

    print "User agent:", os.environ.get("HTTP_USER_AGENT", "unknown")

if you're using some other framework, you may be able to get the
user agent by looking at the HTTP headers; check the framework
docs for details.

for more info on CGI environment variables, see:

    http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/env.html
    http://httpd.apache.org/docs/env.html
    http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html#cgi-spec
    (etc)

</F>