Subject: ANNOUNCE: Net::XWhois 0.41
From: Vipul Ved Prakash <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Dec 1998 04:21:27 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.lang.perl.modules

Net::XWhois
   A generic whois client interface class. 

Location
   ftp://vipul.net/pub/perl/Net-XWhois-0.41.tar.gz

Obsoletes
   Replaces Net::Whois. 

Brief Description

   The Net::XWhois class provides a generic client framework for doing Whois 
   queries and parsing server response.

   The class maintains an array of whois servers and associated lists of top 
   level domains they serve for transparently selecting servers appropriate 
   for different queries.  The server details are, therefore, hidden from the 
   user;  "vipul.net" (from InterNIC), gov.ru (from RIPE) and "bit.ch" (from 
   domreg.nic.ch) are queried in the same manner. This behaviour can be over-
   ridden by specifying different bindings at object construction or by
   registering associations with the class.  See register_association() and 
   new().

   One of the more important features of this module is to enable the design 
   of consistent and predictable interfaces to incompatible whois response 
   formats.  The Whois RFC (954) does not define a template for presenting 
   server data; consequently there is a large variation in layout styles as 
   well as content served across servers.

   To overcome this, Net::XWhois maintains another set of tables, parsing rule-
   sets, for a few, popular response formats. (See the section on %PARSERS). 
   These parsing tables contain section names (labels) together with regular 
   expressions that match the corresponding section text.  The section text 
   is accessed "via" these labels which are available as data instance methods 
   at runtime.  By following a consistent nomenclature for labels, semantically
   related information encoded in different formats can be accessed with the 
   same methods.

Comments, suggestions 
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