PHP Internet Services Getting Information About a Domain Name

PHP Internet Services

Getting Information About a Domain Name

Problem

You want to look up contact information or other details about a domain name.

Solution

Use PEAR’s Net_Whois class:

       require 'Net/Whois.php';

       $server = 'whois.godaddy.com';

       $query = 'oreilly.com';

       $whois = new Net_Whois();

       $data = $whois->query($query, $server);

Discussion

The Net_Whois::query() method returns a large text string whose contents reinforce how hard it can be to parse different Whois results. For example, the code in the Solution puts 55 lines of information in $data, beginning with:

       Domain Name: OREILLY.COM

       Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com

       Updated Date: 2013-04-22 17:52:42

       Creation Date: 1997-05-26 23:00:00

       Registrar Expiration Date: 2014-05-25 23:00:00

       Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC

       Registrant Name: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

       Registrant Organization: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

       Registrant Street: 1005 Gravenstein Highway North

       Registrant City: Sebastopol

       Registrant State/Province: California

       Registrant Postal Code: 95472

       Registrant Country: United States

       Admin Name: Admin Contact

       Admin Organization: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

       Admin Street: 1005 Gravenstein Highway North

       Admin City: Sebastopol

       Admin State/Province: California

       Admin Postal Code: 95472

       Admin Country: United States

       Admin Phone: +1.7078277000

       Admin Fax: +1.7078290104

       Admin Email: nic-ac@oreilly.com

       Tech Name: Tech Contact

       Tech Organization: O'Reilly Media, Inc.

       Tech Street: 1005 Gravenstein Highway North

       Tech City: Sebastopol

       Tech State/Province: California

       Tech Postal Code: 95472

       Tech Country: United States

       Tech Phone: +1.7078277000

       Tech Fax: +1.7078290104

       Tech Email: nic-tc@oreilly.com

       Name Server: NSAUTHA.OREILLY.COM

       Name Server: NSAUTHB.OREILLY.COM

       The data contained in GoDaddy.com, LLC's WhoIs database,

       while believed by the company to be reliable, is provided "as is"

       with no guarantee or warranties regarding its accuracy. This

       information is provided for the sole purpose of assisting you

       in obtaining information about domain name registration records.

       Any use of this data for any other purpose is expressly forbidden without the

       prior written permission of GoDaddy.com, LLC. By submitting an inquiry,

       you agree to these terms of usage and limitations of warranty. In particular,

       you agree not to use this data to allow, enable, or otherwise make possible,

       dissemination or collection of this data, in part or in its entirety, for any

       purpose, such as the transmission of unsolicited advertising and

       and solicitations of any kind, including spam. You further agree

       not to use this data to enable high volume, automated or robotic electronic

       processes designed to collect or compile this data for any purpose,

       including mining this data for your own personal or commercial purposes.

       Please note: the registrant of the domain name is specified

       in the "registrant" section. In most cases, GoDaddy.com, LLC

       is not the registrant of domain names listed in this database.

Different domains use different Whois servers. And different Whois servers return differently formatted results. To find the correct Whois server for a domain, start by querying against whois.iana.org. That server’s output will contain a line beginning with whois: which indicates the right server to use for the top-level domain of the particular domain you’re interested in. And then you can query that server for the specific details of the domain:

       require 'Net/Whois.php';

       $query = 'oreilly.com';

       $iana_server = 'whois.iana.org';

       $whois = new Net_Whois();

       $iana_data = $whois->query($query, $iana_server);

       preg_match('/^whois:\s+(.+)$/m', $iana_data, $matches);

       $tld_whois_server = $matches[1];

       $tld_data = $whois->query($query, $tld_whois_server);

       print $tld_data;

And then depending on the details of the domain, you may have to query an additional server. For example, the second query in the preceding code returns that whois.godaddy.com is the authoritative Whois server for oreilly.com.