Readme for analog -- the domains file

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# Readme for analog 4.11

## The domains file

The domains file tells analog which country is represented by each domain. You can tell analog where to find your domains file with a command like

    DOMAINSFILE lang/mydomains.tab

Normally you don't need this command, because if there is a domains file in your language, it should be selected automatically. But the `DOMAINSFILE` command can be useful if you want to use a domains file in a new language, for example.

You should have got a domains file with the program, but if you've lost it, you can download one from http://www.analog.cx/ukdom.tab. It should contain on each line a domain code, followed by a number, followed by its location, like this:

    ad  2  Andorra
    ae  3  United Arab Emirates
    [...]

It does not need to be in alphabetical order, though humans may prefer it that way. Subdomains do not go in the domains file: you can list them in the Domain Report using the `SUBDOMAIN` command.

The number beside each domain represents how many levels deep an "organisation" is considered to be, for the purposes of the Organisation Report. For example, consider the hostname `www.sta.ad`. The organisation is `sta.ad`, at the second level, so Andorra has a 2 in the above list. But in the UAE, a host looks like `www.economy.gov.ae`. There is an extra level in the hierarchy, so the UAE has its organisations at level 3.

There are some problems with this. A few countries have organisations at both levels 2 and 3 (for example `asaspace.at` and `univie.ac.at`). In those cases I've favoured false negatives over false positives by using the bigger number. (Also there is a correction which will make most of them right again: the first component is always removed from a hostname of three or more components.) For other countries, I don't have enough information to tell what the level should be. I've just given those a 1. Do let me know if you have any more information, or corrections, for the numbers.

If you want HTML special characters in the domains file, you have to precede them with a backslash, like this:

    am   Arm\&eacute;nie

Only domains which occur in the domains file will get their own line in the Domain Report: the rest are probably spurious, and will be accumulated together as "unknown domains". If you have debugging turned on, you can see which domains were unknown.

Lines starting with a hash (`#`) in the domains file are considered to be comments.

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