This software quickly matches an input string literally or against a prefix followed by 1 or more additional characters, e.g. "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)" or "Mozilla/4.0*". You will need Python 2.5, 2.6, or 2.7 installed; no additional libraries are necessary.

To run tests in a terminal:
cd uamatch
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:..
python tests/test_basic.py
python tests/test_performance.py

On a laptop running 32 bit Ubuntu 10.04, the matcher can test approximately 1.5 million pseudorandom user agent strings per second against 250000 pseudorandom match patterns. See test_speed in test_performance.py.

To run interactively, in the uamatch directory do:
python simplematch.py

In interactive mode you can type matchRegex("pattern") to test if a string matches any pattern in the set.

The default pattern set is:
Ask
Ask*
Mozilla/1.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma*
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma*
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves)
Baiduspider-image*
Baiduspider-ads*
Baiduspider-cpro*
Baiduspider-favo*

To load a different pattern set for interactive testing, run:
python simplematch.py -p pattern_file.txt

where the pattern file contains one literal or wildcard-suffixed pattern per line.