Free / Open Source WHOIS API

Question

Looking for a Free / OpenSource WHOIS API that returns results in XML or some usable format?

Answer 1

ProgrammableWeb is a great place to start for things like this. A search there showed me the following:

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/whois

However, since that isn't free after the trial period, you could always just do an HTTP GET request to http://www.whois.net, like so:

http://www.whois.net/whois/microsoft..com

And then use regex scraping to acquire the various fields.