Using pywhois for retrieving WHOIS information

What is pywhois?

pywhois is a Python module for retrieving WHOIS information of domains. pywhois works with Python 2.4+ and no external dependencies [Source]

Installation

The installation of pywhois is done through the pip command.

pip install python-whois

Now when the package is installed, you can start using it. Remember, that you have to import it first.

import whois

pywhois Usage

We can use the pywhois module to query a WHOIS server directly and to parse WHOIS data for a given domain. We are able to extract data for all the popular TLDs (com, org, net, …)

pywhois Examples

On the pywhois project website, we can see how we can use pywhois to extract data.

Let’s begin by importing the whois module and create a variable.

>>> import whois >>> w = whois.whois('pythonforbeginners.com’)

To print the values of all found attributes, we simple type:

>>> print w

The output should look something like this:

creation_date: [datetime.datetime(2012, 9, 15, 0, 0), '15 Sep 2012 20:41:00']
domain_name: ['PYTHONFORBEGINNERS.COM', 'pythonforbeginners.com']
...
...
updated_date: 2013-08-20 00:00:00
whois_server: whois.enom.com

We can print out any attribute we want. Say, that you just want to print out the expiration date:

>>> w.expiration_date 

Show the content downloaded from the whois server:

>>> w.text 

To make the program a bit more interactive, we can add a prompt where users can put any domain they want retrieve WHOIS information for.

import whois

data = raw_input("Enter a domain: ")
w = whois.whois(data)

print w

With the help of the pywhois module, we can use Python to do WHOIS lookups.

More reading

http://code.google.com/p/pywhois/