Getting contact info from a domain (via a script)

[tristanperry]

EDIT: Thanks for the info all I've coded up a web-based tool for this now.

Hi all,
For a project I'm working on, I'm looking to get the contact info from a domain (i.e. a WHOIS scan). Obviously it'd not be used for any spammy purposes (it'll be limited to one check at a time, with flood protection, and the e-mail address will be output as an image)

I know that to get the general info about a domain you connect to the relevant WHOIS server via port 43, and then send the request with the domain, a carriage return and a new line and the details like registrar, expiration/creation date (etc) gets returned.

But am I right in thinking that the only way to get the actual contact info is by querying the registrar's WHOIS servers? If so, what's the best way to do this? Since there's thousands of registrars, and I can't see any of them have any sort of API to run the WHOIS request through.

Thanks for any info you can provide This will be for a custom script, I'm writing it myself (it'll be for a website project I'm working on), hence why I don't want to just use another, already created WHOIS website.

Thanks,
Tristan

 

[katherine]

For .com/.net you need to query the registrar. The registry info provides a pointer to the sponsoring registrar and the whois server to query.

 

[tristanperry]

For .com/.net you need to query the registrar. The registry info provides a pointer to the sponsoring registrar and the whois server to query.

You are quite right, thanks It seems that (out of the list of TLDs I'm allowing for the script to scan), only .com, .net and .name doesn't return the contact info (and I'm not too concerned about .name right now :tongue1. Thought all of them only provided limited info and you had to query the registrar in each case. "You learn something new every day" ^^

Just to quickly check - for .com and .net it'll come back with something like:

"Whois Server: whois.moniker.com Referral URL: http://www.moniker.com/whois.html"

Would that mean that I should then connect to whois.moniker.com on port 43, submit a HTTP referral header, and then query the domain as before?

 

[katherine]

Just use the whois server.
The referral URL usually points to the registrar's home page.
Now you can use the web interface of Moniker or any other registrar to query whois on a domain but there are limitations normally.

 

[tristanperry]

Just use the whois server.
The referral URL usually points to the registrar's home page.
Now you can use the web interface of Moniker or any other registrar to query whois on a domain but there are limitations normally.

Okay I will do, thanks a lot for the help

 

[ecomindia]

IS there any script like several domain tools script that checks huge list of domains for whois details for TLDs

PHP/ASP/CGI script will do ..

 

[tristanperry]

IS there any script like several domain tools script that checks huge list of domains for whois details for TLDs

PHP/ASP/CGI script will do ..

There's Domain Research Tool. Not many other bulk checkers out there, but DRT is decent (but expensive considering that it is quite buggy)

 

[ecomindia]

Thanks Tristan . But looking for web based bulk checking script , if any ..
no application / stand-alone tool.

 

[tristanperry]

Thanks Tristan . But looking for web based bulk checking script , if any ..
no application / stand-alone tool.

Oh I see, sorry Yeah, am not too sure if any exist at the moment. GoDaddy allow you to check 500 at a time, but you must do this manually. Good for small lists though.

 

[GUA]

Depending on what you need specifically GUA.com extracts whois information.

 

[JoshuaPz]

The following TLDs use "thin" whois (contact info is stored with the registrar):
* .com
* .net
* .tv
* .cc
For these TLDs, you'll need to query the whois service of the actual registrar (GoDaddy, eNom, etc.) to obtain contact info. If you're a perl guy like I am, you could use a module like Net::Whois::Raw to extract raw whois, then parse out contact information. The latter step is a pretty challenging as the whois format changes significantly from one registrar to the next, which is why you can't find any publicly available tools (AFAIK) which do such parsing. I have, however, successfully managed to write a fairly universal whois contact info parser which works with all major registrars and I use it to generate the sales leads data offered by the service specified in my sig. I haven't written a web interface for bulk scanning names though because I'd need more resources (e.g. numerous IP addresses, for load-balancing requests propely) than I have available to allow public access to such a tool.

Nearly all gTLDs other than above (.org, .info, etc.) as well as ccTLDs use "thick" whois -- that is, the contact information is stored centrally. You can obtain the information by connecting to [tld].whois-services.net (where [tld] is "org", "info", etc.) on TCP port 43 and sending the text string "domain [domain]" (where [domain] is the domain you'd like contact info for of course) followed by a Unix newline. The returned data is always in the same form no matter that the TLD and is hence extremely easy to parse. PM me and I'll send you a 60-line perl snippit which parses out thick whois contact info.

Good luck!

 

[tristanperry]

Hi Josh,
Hmm yeah, thanks for the information I'll PM you now to see how you've gone about extracting the info from the 'thick' WHOIS data, seems like it could be a useful script thanks.

 

[vistaxie]

you should get one domain query api for doing that,instead of grab web pages from moniker or other registar else.cos there is always a query limit for each registar,i think

best wishes

 

[DomainMagnate]

IS there any script like several domain tools script that checks huge list of domains for whois details for TLDs

PHP/ASP/CGI script will do ..

any experienced coder can do it. Just post a project on a freelance site