Whois2 FAQ v1.2 June 06/00 Mark Jeftovic [email protected]
Q's
1.0 How do I tell if a domain is available or not? 1.1 I'm getting "Fatal error: Call to unsupported or undefined function preg_replace()" why? 1.2 whois2 breaks under PHP4, I get $result["rawdata"] = Array now instead of the actual data!
Q & A's
1.0 How do I tell if a domain is available or not?
The big difference between this and version 1 is the absence of the FOUND flag.
Anyways, for .com/.net/.org you can tell that a domain is available or not if the regyinfo array is empty.
$whois = new Whois("test.com"); $result = $whois->Lookup();
if(empty($result["regyinfo"])) { // available } else { // taken }
Keep in mind that this isn't 100% surefire. A domain can be dropped from the registry for nonpayment, and remain in limbo for up to 5 days where it still cannot be registered. Also, whois servers can lag behind the root servers by as much as 24 or even 48 hours in extreme cases.
You can also check if there are any nameserver RR's defined (and thus infer that the domain is in the root servers) by calling ns_rr_defined($domain) in the utils extended class.
For other TLD's it's up to you to either grep the results for what you know to be a "not found" string, or write an extended handler that does a cleaner job of it, which you can then submit to this project and immortalize yourself :)
1.1 I'm getting "Fatal error: Call to unsupported or undefined function preg_replace()" why?
All that means is that the version of PHP you're using doesn't have the perl regular expression module. You can either upgrade or in the meantime just move netsol.whois out of the php_include_path, you won't get nicely parsed output for netsol domains but you will still at least get the raw output then.