this may be out of the realm of stackoverflow, but I have a problem. I am trying to automatically insert the name of the College/University every one of my signups attends. They can only use a .edu email to signup and I was wondering If there were a way to see the College or University the email belonged to?
Ex:
morris@uakron.edu
Would return:
The University of Akron
Or does someone know where I could find such a directory?
Thanks
You can populate a MySQL table with all the university names and their email domains. Here is a sample directory that you can perhaps start with.
Once you've done that, you can parse the user's email for the domain. Here is a very similar answer on how to get the domain name from an email address.
Once you have got the domain from the user's email, retrieve the university/college's name from the MySQL database. (If it does not exist, it's worth logging since it could be a new domain name that is not in your database yet)
Swot is a project (written in Ruby) that does exactly that. It checks that if a given email belongs to an educational institute (using a database filled with domain-names mapped to institute names).
Swot allows you to identify whether a particular email address or domain is associated with an academic institution providing higher education in tertiary, quaternary or post-secondary education in any country in the world.
You probably can utilize some parts of it in your code (Swot's database by itself is a great treasure).
An alternative to looking it up in a table is to do a who-is search on the domain the email came from to find who it is registered to.
You can use a service like WhoisAPI to make the API calls and then parse the output for the registrant name. Might not always give exactly what you want, though.
