Whois information can be accessed from whoever the official authority over that particular TLD is. For example, VeriSign Global Registry Servers controls the .COM and .NET top-level domains, so you would access their whois servers to retrieve a whois record for any .COM domain name (such as trap17.com).
Note that whois servers operate on port 43, so you would need to connect, in this example, to whois.verisign-grs.com:43 to retrieve a whois record. After connection, all you need to send to the server is the domain name followed by CR+LF (\r\n or chr(13).chr(10)), and the whois server will return the record if the domain exists (or will inform you if it doesn't).
You will need to know a little about socket coding to access a whois records, regarldess of which programming language you wish to do it in.
Here is an example of retrieving a whois record. I quickly constructed this while writing this post, and haven't tested it - theoretically, at least, it should work.
CODE
<?php
function whois_record( $domain_name, $whois_server = 'whois.verisign-grs.com' ) {
if( !($socket = @fsockopen($whois_server,43) ) {
die('Could not connect to whois server.');
}
// Note that the '=' symbol means the domain name is explicit, and instructs the whois server to return a result for that domain name only, not for other possible matches (e.g. try 'google.com' without the equals symbol).
fputs($socket, "=$domain_name\r\n");
$whois_record = '';
while( !feof($socket) ) {
$whois_record .= fgets($socket,1024);
}
fclose($socket);
return $whois_record;
}
?>
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