• NAME
• SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
• SYNOPSIS
• DESCRIPTION
• AUTHOR
• COPYRIGHT

NAME

Net::Whois - Get and parse ``whois'' domain data from InterNIC

SUPPORTED PLATFORMS

• Linux
• Solaris
• Windows

SYNOPSIS

Note that all fields except ``name'' and ``tag'' may be undef because ``whois'' information is erratically filled in.

use Net::Whois; use Carp;

 my $w = new Net::Whois::Domain $dom
 or die "Can't connect to Whois server\n;

 unless ($w->ok) { croak "No match for $dom";}

 print "Domain: ", $w->domain, "\n";
 print "Name: ", $w->name, "\n";
 print "Tag: ", $w->tag, "\n";
 print "Address:\n", map { "    $_\n" } $w->address;
 print "Country: ", $w->country, "\n";
 print "Name Servers:\n", map { "    $$_[0] ($$_[1])\n" }
 @{$w->servers};
 my ($c, $t);
 if ($c = $w->contacts) {
   print "Contacts:\n";
   for $t (sort keys %$c) {
     print "    $t:\n";
     print map { "\t$_\n" } @{$$c{$t}};
   }
 }
 print "Record created:", $w->record_created ;
 print "Record updated:", $w->record_updated ;

DESCRIPTION

Net::Whois::Domain new() attempts to retrieve and parse the given domain's ``whois'' information from the InterNIC (whois.internic.net). If the server could not be contacted, is too busy, or otherwise does not process the query then the constructor does not return a reference and your object is undefined. If the constructor returns a reference, that reference can be used to access the various attributes of the domains' whois entry assuming that there was a match. The member function ok returns 1 if a match 0 if no match.

Note that the Locale::Country module (part of the Locale-Codes distribution) is used to recognize spelled-out country names; if that module is not present, only two-letter country abbreviations will be recognized.

The server consulted is ``whois.internic.net''. You can only get .org, .edu, .net, .com domains from Internic. Other whois servers for other Top-Level-Domains (TLD) return information in a different syntax and are not supported at this time. Also, only queries for domains are valid. Querying for a network will fail utterly since those are not kept in the whois.internic.net server (a future enhancement will add a network lookup function). Querying for NIC handles won't work since they have a different return syntax than a domain. Domains other than those listed won't work they're not in the server. A future enhancment planned will send the query to the appropriate server based on its TLD.

AUTHOR

Originally written by Chip Salzenberg (chip@pobox.com) in April of 1997 for Idle Communications, Inc. In September of 1998 Dana Hudes (dhudes@hudes.org) found this but it was broken and he needed it so he fixed it. In August, 1999 Dana and Chip agreed to become co-maintainers of the module. Dana released a new version of Net::Whois to CPAN and resumed active development.

COPYRIGHT

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. If you make modifications, the author would like to know so that they can be incorporated into future releases.