: Is there a schema definition for Domain Name Registries? I work on a service that, among other things, validates user-provided information against the data retrieved via WHOIS. Most transactions

@Merenda212

Your question depend on the TLD for which you query domain names through whois. Most gTLDs and specifically the ones from 2012 have to follow an ICANN mandated format. However ccTLDs have no such obligations and basically each one is doing its own thing.

In some future, RDAP may replace or at least coexist with whois, and RDAP uses a specific JSON structure for replies, so it is easier to parse (it was built exactly for that, among other things).

Also depending on the TLD, you may have access to other kind of data structures and/or sources. For example, some registries provide opendata (but not necessarily real time fresh).

Again, without the TLDs concerned, it is hard to give you tailored replies.

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@Jessie594

There is no schema per-say of the data and format which is returned through a whois query. Whois data is generally returned as simple text designed to be human readable. The companies that parse whois data to extract key information from it generally use regex searches to identify key field names in the string and extract the data after it to parse the data. There are a number of services online that provide programmatic whois api services which have done the heavily lifting of parsing the whois data and return it as an XML or JSON file. Sounds like this is what you may be looking for.

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