Where can I get a list of User Agents? Ideally an API

Question

I'm creating a fairly elaborate API and part of what it does is make requests and scrapes etc. I need a list of User Agents to be used by the API. For example someone may hit my API and with a request to scrape http://website.com with the latest FireFox agent, or IE 6, or a default agent.

My question is, does anyone know of an API where I can retrieve a large list of User Agents and periodically update my list? I'm not finding any good options.

Please and thank you

Answer 1

Have you considered using web scraping? Here is some simple scraping code in C# that gets a list 9388 user agents from this website: http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Browserlist/

        WebClient web = new WebClient();
        string url = "http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Browserlist/";
        HtmlWeb webget = new HtmlWeb();
        HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument  currentHTML = webget.Load(url);
        var nodesIE = currentHTML.DocumentNode.SelectNodes(@"//li//a");
        List<string> userAgentList = new List<string>();
        foreach (var node in nodesIE)
        { userAgentList.Add(node.InnerHtml); }

You need htmlagilitypack to run the code (or you can make your own regex on the text)