Browscapper¶ ↑

I suppose this could also be called Yet Another Browscap.ini Reader.

Browscapper.load('path/to/browscap.ini')
Browscapper.match('Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8')
#=> Browscapper::UserAgent

Browscapper.matches
#=> Array of Browscapper::UserAgents, in order of best-to-worst matches.

The most widely used browscap.ini file is probably Gary Keith’s, found at browsers.garykeith.com/downloads . For the sake of convenience and compatibiilty, Browscapper.load will look in the current directory for a browscap.ini file. However, Browscapper can also read in browscap.csv files as well, which are also available from Gary’s site, as well as YAML files and files written in Ruby’s own Marshal’d file format. In fact, for the sake of performance and speed, you may want to consider dumping browscap.ini files into the Marshal’d format, which loads much faster than any of the other file formats. For the sake of comparison, here are some benchmarks from on my current development laptop (MacBook Pro 10,1 with a solid state drive):

bench_csv  1.111839s
bench_ini  3.801561s
bench_marshal  0.081942s

These are just the averages from a few runs, but the result is pretty clear all the same: the Marshal’d format is by far quicker. (The YAML parser currently has some problems with some messed up encodings and isn’t really recommended for prime time.)

To dump Browscapper into a Marshal’d format, you can either call Browscapper.dump and write the results to a file or you can use the provided rake task thusly:

rake browscapper:dump IN=browscap.ini OUT=browscap.dump

You can also convert between formats using the ‘browscapper:convert` task:

rake browscapper:convert IN=browscap.dump OUT=browscap.yml

See the MIT-LICENSE file for details.