Regular expression style Whois lookups with PHP.

Question

Hi everyone,

I am recently finding myself in a situation at work where I am expected to create a pattern matching domain name search. (ie., mydomain* should match mydomain1,mydomainanotherone etc. etc.) My platform is Linux based (CentOS 5) with Apache 2 and PHP. I also have the Pear whois library installed (dont want to use the exec("whois ~~") style unless I have to). After searching a bit I have find some other sites which offer pattern based searches on domain names, however, from the opensource tools I have available there doesn't seem to be an obvious canditate for the job.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Most whois servers will cap you at a number of requests per day or per hour. So doing this on demand will be tricky unless you have access to an unrestricted whois provider. Can't think of one.