whois

[nobrowser-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org]

For the (web based) UI of our application, we'd like to display the Real
Life (TM) details of an organisation based on an IP address.  This is
what the whois service is for.  Unfortunately, what the whois server
actually replies with is not specified by any RFC or other standard that
I am aware of, and in practice the format is nearly free form.  That
would be OK if all we wanted to do was to show the first reply; but we
need to follow the referrals to other whois servers holding information
about suballocated blocks.  Our problem is, then, that the format of
these referrals also varies, and no existing software seems to cover all
of them.

As an example, try this with the whois client in debian (by
md-k2GhghHVRtY at public.gmane.org):

whois -h whois.arin.net 61.100.186.185

you'll see that it correctly handled the first referral (from
whois.arin.net to whois.apnic.net) but missed the next which was buried
in this snippet:

remarks:      This IP address space has been allocated to KRNIC.
remarks:      For more information, using KRNIC Whois Database
remarks:      whois -h whois.nic.or.kr

Does anyone know of a general solution to this situation?

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