jrogov / wootheex

Super fast User-Agent parser for Elixir

Wootheex

The Elixir implementation of Project Woothee, which is multi-language user-agent strings parsers.

There are simply NIF bindings to Rust implementation of the project.

Installation

Rust setup

To successfully compile wootheex, Rust toolchain must be installed on your system with either rustup or any other installation method.

Once you have that installed (paths may differ):

~ $ which cargo rustc
/home/user/.cargo/bin/cargo
/home/user/.cargo/bin/rustc

You can jump to the next step.

Library Installation

To install Wootheex you just add it to deps in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:wootheex, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

And then download deps with mix deps.get.

Rationale

All existing UA parsers are not fast enough for soft real-time systems. Examples are:

UAInspector

The most advanced one, identifies most bots (~95%), but also the slowest one (around 10ms per UA)

UAParser and uap-elixir

These has less functonality, do not identify bots at all, although have better performance (around 1ms)

Wootheex

Because of high performance of original Rust implementation of Project Woothee, binding it's functionality with NIFs gives its full power to Elixir with around 8 microsecond, which is more than 1000 times faster than UAInspector, and about 100 times faster than other implementations

Usage

With defined user agent:

iex(1)> user_agent =  "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.155 Safari/537.36"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.155 Safari/537.36"

For basic information in a simple tuple, call Wootheex.parse/1:

iex(1)> Wootheex.parse(user_agent)
{:pc, "Chrome", :browser, "44.0.2403.155", "Mac OSX", "10.10.4", "Google"}

For more fancy result call Wootheex.UserAgent.parse/1:

iex(3)> Wootheex.UserAgent.parse(user_agent)
%Wootheex.UserAgent{
    browser_name: "Chrome",
    browser_type: :browser,
    browser_version: "44.0.2403.155",
    category: :pc,
    os: "Mac OSX",
    os_version: "10.10.4",
    vendor: "Google"
}