Detecting Browsers in Python

[Gerhard Häring]

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?

Interpret the User-Agent field.

It depends on your system how to acess the User-Agent field. If you're 
using a CGI script, try this one:

import os
print "Content-type: text/plain"
print
print "User-Agent:", os.environ.get("HTTP_USER_AGENT", "N/A")

To see what information you can access from a web request, try this CGI 
script:

import cgi
cgi.test()

For actually interpreting this field, a Google search for "python parse 
HTTP_USER_AGENT" would be my starting point.

HTH,

-- Gerhard

PS: In case you're using Apache, you can use modules like mod_rewrite to 
redirect users to specialized pages, depending on the reported User-Agent.