List of .ac.uk addresses (strange question)

glider3560

A friend of mine is writing a program for their coursework and they want part of it to recognise the university/college of people who enter a .ac.uk email address.

E.g. so if someone enters something@open.ac.uk, the program will know that they are from The Open University and populate this into a form.

Does anyone know if there is a comprehensive list of .ac.uk's along with the institution's name? Doesn't really matter what format the list is in as he'll be importing it into an SQL database anyway.

Thanks

Lokolo

Go to google, type *.ac.uk

And it will give you all sites with .ac.uk

HTH

(http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=*.ac.uk)

Stubert

That search does return any website that has an @...ac.uk email address on it, hence there are about 2 billion results.

http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/AboutUs/WhoWeAre/Pages/Members.aspx

That website has a list of the all the UK registered universities and some colleges of further education.

There are lots of FE colleges that also have .ac.uk addresses which aren't on there that your buddy might want to consider, but all the UK universities are on there.

atypical

He may also have the issue that the same university can use different domains (if that's the right terminology) e.g. The Open University may use @student.open.ac.uk as well as @staff.open.ac.uk as well as @open.ac.uk.

Stubert

Great point. Manchester definitely uses @student.manchester and @postgrad.manchester

Mankysteve

Your friends idea is nice but going to impossible to catalogue all the uni's in the country and there variations in domains not mention every time a uni makes a change in adress. The phrase give up while your ahead comes to mind.

glider3560

Stubert wrote: »

That search does return any website that has an @...ac.uk email address on it, hence there are about 2 billion results.

http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/AboutUs/WhoWeAre/Pages/Members.aspx

That website has a list of the all the UK registered universities and some colleges of further education.

There are lots of FE colleges that also have .ac.uk addresses which aren't on there that your buddy might want to consider, but all the UK universities are on there.

That is absolutely brilliant. Sent it to him and he's written a script which has converted it into his database format. Obviously, not everything is in there but he has the majority covered so can ask the user to input the uni/college name if it doesn't exist already.

someone

Stubert wrote: »

Great point. Manchester definitely uses @student.manchester and @postgrad.manchester

and @cs.man.ac.uk

StudentMoneySaver

Would the subdomain actually need to be specified? As long as the main domain is recognised it should work, if it doesn't recognise addresses with two levels he could try adding a wildcard for every domain, for example. open.ac.uk should also be listed as *.open.ac.uk to catch any addresses such as student.open.ac.uk.

I don't have much database query experience beyond AS ICT but it is worth thinking about.

sparky7

http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/database/university_lists.htm

you could also submit a FOI request to janet.ac.uk who manage the .ac.uk domains..

stevenhp1987

StudentMoneySaver wrote: »

Would the subdomain actually need to be specified? As long as the main domain is recognised it should work, if it doesn't recognise addresses with two levels he could try adding a wildcard for every domain, for example. open.ac.uk should also be listed as *.open.ac.uk to catch any addresses such as student.open.ac.uk.

I don't have much database query experience beyond AS ICT but it is worth thinking about.

Would be doable via regex, simple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression