PHP User Agent Parser

PhpUserAgent (donatj/phpuseragentparser) is a lightning-fast, minimalist PHP library for parsing HTTP User-Agent strings into their key components: browser name, browser version, and platform. It deliberately avoids the enormous rule databases used by heavier device-detection tools, favoring a compact regular-expression approach that stays fast and dependency-free.

The library exposes a single parse function (and an object-oriented wrapper) that returns a structured result from any User-Agent string. It is a long-standing, well-maintained option for lightweight browser and platform detection in PHP applications, analytics pipelines, and logging, where knowing the broad browser/OS is enough and full device fingerprinting is unnecessary.

What You Get

• A simple parse_user_agent() function returning browser, version, and platform
• An object-oriented UserAgent wrapper for typed access
• No runtime dependencies beyond ext-ctype and no external data files
• Broad PHP compatibility (PHP 5.4 through modern versions)
• Fast, allocation-light parsing suited to high-throughput logging

Common Use Cases

• Recording browser and platform for server-side analytics
• Enriching access logs with human-readable client information
• Lightweight browser gating without a full device-detection database
• Segmenting traffic by browser or OS in reporting pipelines

Under The Hood

Architecture - The core is src/UserAgentParser.php, which exposes the procedural parse_user_agent() function that applies a single large, carefully ordered regular expression to extract platform, browser, and version tokens from the User-Agent string. An object-oriented layer under src/UserAgent (donatj\UserAgent namespace) wraps the array result in a UserAgent value object with typed getters.

Tech Stack - Pure PHP with an extremely small dependency surface — only the ctype extension is required at runtime, and no external device databases are bundled. Composer autoloads both the function file and the PSR-4 namespace. Development uses PHPUnit and a Makefile-driven workflow.

Code Quality - Despite its age, the project is actively maintained with 50+ releases, a focused tests/ suite, and continuous refinement of its regex against real-world User-Agent samples. The minimalist design keeps the surface small and auditable.

API Design - The API is intentionally tiny: call parse_user_agent($ua) for an associative array, or instantiate UserAgent for typed access. There are no configuration steps, data downloads, or setup, which makes it trivial to drop into an existing codebase.