Check Domain Availablility?

[MTBill]

Does anyone have a small bit of code to check the availability of a domain?

The $domain variable will always end in .com .net or .org. All I need it to do is if domain is available set $available = "yes" otherwise $available = "no" anything out there?

Thanks

[Shrike]

How do you define a domain as 'available' ?

[MTBill]

Sorry, should have been more clear. By available I mean not registered.

Thanks

[drew010]

here is a little snippet i made. if you decide to change the whois.networksolutions to another registrar you may need to do a test run and see what string they use when there is no match. netsol uses There is no match for this domain, but others may use something else. you can also modify this to be a boolean function quite easity by changing "yes" to true and "no" to false.

<?php

function checkAvailability($domain)
{

$fp = @fsockopen("whois.networksolutions.com", 43, $errno, $errstr, 15);
if (!$fp) die("Could not connect to whois server.");

fputs($fp, "whois $domain\n");

(string)$result = "";

while(!feof($fp)) {
	$result .= fgets($fp);
}

fclose($fp);

if (strpos(strtolower($result), "no match") !== FALSE) {
	return "yes";
} else {
	return "no";
}
}

$available = checkAvailability("google.com");

echo $available; //echo's no

?> 

as you can see to get the availablility just call it like $available = checkAvailability("domainname.com");

[Shrike]

function  check($domain){
  $available = "no";
  $check = gethostbyname($domain);
  if($check == $domain){
    $available = "yes";
  }
  return $available;
}
echo $available = check("www.google.com");

[MTBill]

Thanks drew010, works great.

Shrike, that's what I had originally (almost anyway - same idea), the thing is if the domain is registered and is dead or not doing anything it shows as Available, so it's not always as accurate.

Thanks all for your help 😃