Which database for UA parser?

For engineers Enrichment
1

Hello,

We seem to have issues in parsing the user agent of iOS >=12 devices.

Random example:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148 Instagram 152.0.0.21.114 (iPhone11,8; iOS 13_5_1; pt_BR; pt; scale=2.00; 828x1792; 234053878) NW/1


os_name = Mac OS X (iPhone)
os_family = iOS

when this other random example:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.3.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/14C92 Version/11.0 Safari/604.1

os_name = iOS 10 (iPhone)
os_family = iOS

which is much better.
Due to this, we have no way of knowing which version of iOS was used when it’s >= 12.

I figured I would check the UA parser enrichment and the database it’s using.

We’re currently using:

s3://snowplow-hosted-assets/third-party/ua-parser/regexes.yaml

I noticed that both this database above AND this one below are showing up in the docs:

s3://snowplow-hosted-assets/third-party/ua-parser/regexes-latest.yaml

I’m unsure which one we should be using and which one is maintained up to date. I’m noticing that regexes-latest.yaml has more entries but since it’s about regexes, not certain this means anything.

I’m also unsure this will solve my problem so I guess this leaves me with 2 questions.

1 - Is anyone else having UA parsing issues over iOS >= 12 devices and events?
2 - Which library (regexes or regexes-latest) is kept up to date?

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

Ref for the docs:

regexes.yaml


regexes-latest.yaml
2

regexes-latest is the one that is kept up to date, regexes is quite out of date at the moment (2018-08-14).

I’d also recommend turning on the YAUAA enrichment if you haven’t already, I’ve typically found that it’s parsing tends to be a bit better than ua-parser.

3

Thanks a bunch!

I’ll definitely try it out.