Re: whois server features

[shawn wilson <ag4ve.us () gmail com>]

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net> wrote:
> > > So, you’re not running into a poorly-documented mystery, you’ve run afoul of one of the rotten armpits of the 
> > > shub-Internet.
> > So there's no consensus between NICs for the information they should
> > have in whois and what search mechanisms they should provide? I guess
> > what you're saying is that whois is just a protocol definition and
> > nothing else?
>
> Correct.  It gets you a blob of text.  Sometimes, a blob is just a blob.  Other times, it contains what _appear_ to 
> be key-value pairs, but are instead loosely-formatted text.  Other times, it contains textually-represented key-value 
> pairs that are programmatically generated from an actual database, and can thus be re-imported into another database. 
>  Depends what’s on the back end.

This is not the response I was looking for (and reading the RFC makes
me feel even worse).

Is there a better mechanism for querying NICs for host/owner information?