Hi, I have found a great site with lots of useful information for programmers & developers of all kinds.

I have developed code which provides this type of facility but it is internal to my company. The problem is a bit complex since WHOIS data can be formatted differently by each Registrar. Connecting to the WHOIS server and retrieving the data blob is the easy part (as you have seen from the other suggestions).

One more thing: accessing WHOIS information using an automated process is prohibited by most Registrars. Finally some registrars (Network Solutions for example) actually block access to their WHOIS server after a certain number of requests from a particular IP address. Just something to consider.

Try this:

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

public class Whois {
    static final int WHOIS_PORT = 43;
    static final String WHOIS_SERVER_NAME = "whois.internic.net";
    static final String QUERY = "jguru.com
";

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            byte[] queryBytes = QUERY.getBytes();
            InetAddress whoisServer = InetAddress.getByName(WHOIS_SERVER_NAME);
            Socket whoisSocket = new Socket(whoisServer, WHOIS_PORT);
            InputStream reciever = whoisSocket.getInputStream();
            OutputStream sender = whoisSocket.getOutputStream();

            sender.write(queryBytes);
            sender.flush();

            byte[] b = new byte[1024];
            int length = 0;

            while ((length = reciever.read(b)) != -1) {
                System.out.write(b, 0, length);
            }

            whoisSocket.close();
        } catch (UnknownHostException e) {
            System.out.println("Unknown host: " + WHOIS_SERVER_NAME);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.out.println("Network error: " + e.getMessage());
        }
    }
}

There appears to be a client from GeekTools which appears in a listing from www.jars.com - have a look there and see if it has what you need...

Dermot