Well, things were a bit less helpful than I'd hoped.
$ whois ac.jp Domain Information: [%I%a%$%s>pJs] a. [%I%a%$%sL>] AC.JP e. [$=$7$-$a$$] f. [AH?%L>] 3X=Q%I%a%$%s g. [Organization] Academic Domain k. [AH?%<oJL] l. [Organization Type] m. [EPO?C4Ev<T] n. [5;=QO"MmC4Ev<T] p. [%M!<%`%5!<%P] a.dns.jp p. [%M!<%`%5!<%P] b.dns.jp p. [%M!<%`%5!<%P] c.dns.jp p. [%M!<%`%5!<%P] d.dns.jp p. [%M!<%`%5!<%P] e.dns.jp p. [%M!<%`%5!<%P] f.dns.jp p. [%M!<%`%5!<%P] g.dns.jp [>uBV] Reserved [EPO?G/7nF|] [@\B3G/7nF|] [:G=*99?7] 2005/03/30 17:37:52 (JST)While I can figure out what I need here, why the garble? This is 2010 and I'm running in a UTF-8 locale with proper fonts; I should see hiragana/katakana/kanji just fine.
So I looked up the current WHOIS protocol. That's probably the shortest RFC I've ever seen.
The interesting bit: "The WHOIS protocol has no mechanism for indicating the character set in use." ... rrrright. Obviously not UTF-8 on this server.
Some trial and error, then.
$ whois ac.jp > gnark.txt
$ file gnark.txt
gnark.txt: ASCII English text, with escape sequences
Oh thank you. Very helpful. (irritated hacking ensues)
End product (bash function):
function jwhois { whois "$@" | iconv -f iso-2022-jp ; }$ jwhois ac.jp Domain Information: [ドメイン情報] a. [ドメイン名] AC.JP e. [そしきめい] f. [組織名] 学術ドメイン g. [Organization] Academic Domain k. [組織種別] l. [Organization Type] m. [登録担当者] n. [技術連絡担当者] p. [ネームサーバ] a.dns.jp p. [ネームサーバ] b.dns.jp p. [ネームサーバ] c.dns.jp p. [ネームサーバ] d.dns.jp p. [ネームサーバ] e.dns.jp p. [ネームサーバ] f.dns.jp p. [ネームサーバ] g.dns.jp [状態] Reserved [登録年月日] [接続年月日] [最終更新] 2005/03/30 17:37:52 (JST)Looks better, yes?
P.S. This was written using FreeBSD whois. Ubuntu whois acts completely differently - specifically asks for and shows English information in English locales, and breaks interestingly in the Japanese locales I've tested.
