> This is awful. Why don't they simply give the same kind of referral record > like Verisign does? Then one can parse it and go to the correct whois. I > can do this also now, but with this mess they currently display I fear > wording could easily change and there's also no way to find out when > records actually have been transferred and are available from PIR.
They are using the phrase "whois server:" to flag an entry as a referral, so set~ up your parsing script to detect that phrase then query the referred WHOIS server. Of course they are assuming that no registrant will ever put the pharse "whois server:" somewhere in their contact data. (maybe they have already thought of this and banned the entry of that complete phrase)
