<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">Summary:</div><div class="">Currently the whois database accepts “non-breaking-space”-characters in updates. We propose that whois replaces these “non-breaking-space”-characters with regular spaces before storing the object.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Context:</div><div class="">Currently the whois database accepts updates with "non-breaking-space”-characters as part of attribute values. </div><div class="">This behaviour is fairly acceptable, since the "non-breaking-space”-character is part of the “latin1”-character-set which is supported by whois.</div><div class="">The whois database treats these "non-breaking-spaces”-characters as regular spaces and considers the object to be syntactically correct.</div><div class="">However, the object is stored exactly as it was received from the client: including non-breaking-spaces</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Problem:</div><div class="">We think most of these "non-breaking-spaces” where intended to be regular spaces, but ended up mangled due to copy and paste.</div><div class="">So, when such an object is being queried for, the original object (including non-breaking-spaces) is being returned.</div><div class="">This is inconvenient. since most clients cannot handle this “exceptional” character. It many clients it will end up as something like a “?’-character.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Alternative solutions:</div><div class="">-1- Let whois software accept the update but convert "non-breaking-spaces” into regular spaces before storing</div><div class="">-2- Consider requests containing "non-breaking-space”-characters as syntactically incorrect, and do not accept updates containing them. </div><div class="">-3- Keep current solution: You get what you asked for.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Some additional statistics that can be used to understand the size of the problem:</div><div class="">Approximately 3.000 objects (out of 8.000.000) contain "non-breaking-space”-characters. Mostly in “remarks"-, “description"- and “address"-attributes?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><br class=""><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">Marc Grol</div><div class="">member of ripe’s whois database team</div><div class=""><a href="mailto:mgrol@ripe.net" class="">mgrol@ripe.net</a></div><div class="">+31648928856</div></div>
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