Setting a HTTP user agent with mechanize?

Question

I'm having difficulty setting the user-agent. As you can see my custom user_agent_alias is not being returned. Can someone please explain why this isn't working and how I can fix this?

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'
require 'nokogiri'

m = Mechanize.new
m.user_agent_alias = 'My Custom User Agent'
page = m.get("http://whatsmyuseragent.com/")
html = Nokogiri::HTML(page.body)
puts html.xpath('//*[(@id = "body_lbUserAgent")]').map(&:content)

Below is the "user agent" being returned (not what I set):

Mechanize/2.7.3 Ruby/2.0.0p353 (http://github.com/sparklemotion/mechanize/)

Carcamano · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-21 14:35:00Z

5

Turns out that the issue was that user_agent_alias requires a specific type. All acceptable types are as follows:

Linux Firefox (3.6.1)
Linux Konqueror (3)
Linux Mozilla
Mac Firefox (3.6)
Mac Mozilla
Mac Safari (5)
Mac Safari 4
Mechanize (default)
Windows IE 6
Windows IE 7
Windows IE 8
Windows IE 9
Windows Mozilla
iPhone (3.0)
iPad
Android (Motorola Xoom)

Working code:

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

m = Mechanize.new
m.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari 4'
page = m.get("http://whatsmyuseragent.com/")
html = Nokogiri::HTML(page.body)
puts html.xpath('//*[(@id = "body_lbUserAgent")]').map(&:content)

edited Jun 21, 2016 at 14:35

Carcamano

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answered Apr 9, 2014 at 16:44

MrPizzaFace

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2 Comments

Erica Tripp Over a year ago

You can always retrieve the list of supported user_agent_aliases via: puts Mechanize::AGENT_ALIASES.keys. My installation returns

["Mechanize", "Linux Firefox", "Linux Konqueror", "Linux Mozilla", "Mac Firefox", "Mac Mozilla", "Mac Safari 4", "Mac Safari", "Windows Chrome", "Windows IE 6", "Windows IE 7", "Windows IE 8", "Windows IE 9", "Windows Mozilla", "iPhone", "iPad", "Android", "Mac FireFox", "Linux FireFox"]

which is only slightly different from @Fab

Master of Ducks Over a year ago

OP's question was "...and how to fix". @severin answered how to fix it. Thumbsup for the explanation, though.

severin · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-26 14:08:14Z

4

It is actually possible to set any user agent string: you have to use the method Mechanize::Agent#user_agent= instead of Mechanize::Agent#user_agent_alias=.

So if you change your example to:

m = Mechanize.new
m.user_agent = 'My Custom User Agent'
page = m.get("http://whatsmyuseragent.com/")

Then it works.

answered Nov 26, 2015 at 14:08

severin

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