[db-wg] Proposal to allow non-ASCII characters in "org-name:", "person:" and "role:" attributes

On Dec 03, Piotr Strzyzewski via db-wg <db-wg at ripe.net> wrote:

> As the UTF-8 topic was briefly discussed during DB-WG session at RIPE87
> in Rome, I would like to propose moving forward with it. If that means a
> topic for first (?) interim meeting, let it be. Let me know please if
> this works for you. Thanks in advance.
In Rome I talked a bit with Edward about this.
Background: I am the author of the whois client used by all Linux 
distributions.

I fully agree that switching to UTF-8 is desirable, but we cannot just 
change the encoding of port 43 without major side effects.
Since version 5.5.4 (december 2019), the client assumes that the output 
of whois.ripe.net is Latin 1 and then transcodes it to the system 
encoding.
Receiving unexpected UTF-8 would cause mojibake.

My suggestion is to add a new query "command line" option to specify the 
desired encoding (limiting it to either ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8), as 
supported by other whois servers.
-C is the most common choice, but maybe it would be better to use 
--charset to not waste a single letter option.
See https://github.com/rfc1036/whois/blob/next/servers_charset_list .

In a few years then it will be much easier to switch the default from 
Latin 1 to UTF-8.

-- 
ciao,
Marco
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