Whois API and Whois Parser

Question

I'm looking for a program/service that does Whois lookup and parses the whois data into detailed finer details, eg. registrant-> registrant_name, street address, city, state/province, country, email, etc. I googled around and found WhoisAPI, it is a Whois lookup service and Whois Parser that parses into XML, however it's not free. How do I roll one of my own? The difficulty is parsing freeform whois data into components reliably. How can this be done?

Answer 1

I found two projects doing this kind of parse:

• phpwhois: (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpwhois/) no commits since 2007 and code old fashionned
• ruby whois: (http://www.ruby-whois.org/) very active, and growing

But as ruby whois documentation says: in order to support all existing WHOIS servers and registrars, the Whois library should provide more than 500 different parsers. And this is exactly one of the major development goal.

Plus, WhoisAPI not free service, didn't work for the domains i looked for.

Hope this helps.