What's the fastest way to check wheter a domain is available?

Thanks

Go to www.whois.com, and use their domain search!

If you search HotScripts for whois scripts theres plenty there!

lol try and buy it thats what i do and were ever you are trying to buy it from will tell you if you can have it or not

I'm not looking for a website to check domain names, I'm looking for a function in PHP. That's why I'm posting in this, the PHP, forum. And the chilly-thingy script was not helpful. I just wonder if there are a function that do what I want, check wheter a domain is free or not, faster than fopen() -- because fopen() is quite slow.

So are there any faster ways to do this?

Thanks

http://www.whois.org I use it so much.

Some domain services have a domain aviable check thingy.

Ive got a php5 whois

PHP Code:

class whois
{
    const timeout = 30;
    const whoishost = 'whois.internic.net';
    
    public static function lookup($domain){

       $result = "";
       $errno = 0;
       $errstr='';
    
       $fd = fsockopen(whois::whoishost,43, $errno, $errstr, whois::timeout);

       if ($fd){
             fputs($fd, $domain."\015\012");
           while (!feof($fd))    {
            $result .= fgets($fd,128) . "<br />";
           }
           fclose($fd);
        }
         return $result;
     }
}

echo whois::lookup('search-for.com'); 


It should not take you much to reverse engineer it to php4.

Dont forget to add some talkupation to my account if you use it (put plenty on too) .

Ibbo