Re: [browscap] good basic documentation sources for getting started w browscap

[James Titcumb]

Hi John,

All of the documentation we have is on https://github.com/browscap/browscap/wiki, but it's mostly about the generation tool, rather than building an implementation. However, it might be worth investigating the PHP library we support ( https://github.com/browscap/browscap-php ) to see how it works.

The important part to bear in mind that the INI file doesn't directly contain UA strings, so they can't be directly compared to a real UA - they are "match" strings which can be used however you wish; most commonly turned into a regex.

Finally, this might sound odd coming from a project maintainer, but you should also consider whether UA parsing is the correct course of action. Responsive web design and browser-agnostic websites means that UA parsing is a dying art (and that's a good thing, it's largely inaccurate). Browser statistics (in general) are becoming less and less meaningful (unless you're a browser vendor watching your market share of course!). There are, of course, some cases where UA sniffing is still a necessity, but do consider other options first ;)

Hope that helps!

Thanks

James

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 9:02 PM, John Linton via browscap <browscap+APn2wQfYtWJh4QCXUTRvVB9...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

As a developer starting to work with the browscap .ini files and unhappy with Microsoft's implementation of htmlbrowsercapabilites, I was hoping to find a little more in-depth documentation from the bird's eye view about the how/why/what of browscap on the most basic level.  I have a general sense that it provides a listing of valid currently returned userAgent strings and their correlated fields, but unsure beyond that LOD how to proceed.

Please forgive if this has been asked/answered 1000 times before, but so far not seeing best obvious links for this info.

Much appreciated.

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