On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 07:45:27AM +0100, Ian Watkinson wrote: > I have a list of hosts, that I need to get whois information on, so > I turned to my trust perl, and tried to get Net::Whois::RIPE > working. However, I can get the whois header information, and I can > get results, but it seems to not work for all hosts.
Net::Whois::RIPE is specifically for the RIPE whois database, which contains IP address, AS number allocations and the like, rather than the usual domains. It actually works really well, which should be expected given that both it and the database were written by RIPE... > What I am ideally looking for is something in perl that provides me > with the sme funcionality as the normal system command whois, as a > bare minimum. You'll be lucky. There's a whole bunch of different 'standards' for the output of whois servers, but there doesn't seem to be a module that understands them all. When I've done this, I've kept a list of relevant whois servers and strings to match on (I've only been interested in available/ not-available), then use Net::Whois::Raw to actually get the data, and parse the output by hand. There's a couple of modules which know about gTLDs and a handful of ccTLDs, and Net::Domain::ExpireDate seems to know about quite a few for the expiry date only, but a comprehensive module will be a maintenance nightmare. Chris.
