[dbwg] WHOIS Modification - Part 1 of 2

[geoffrey camps]

I think breaking up the proposed separate City, Sate, and Zip line using a
comma as the delimiter may actually be workable.  It might not matter if
there are potential cities with embedded commas, as long as the line is
parsed from right -> left.  The only thing that might break this rationale
is if there are any State/Provinces or Zip Codes in the ARIN database that
contain commas.  Otherwise, we may be ok.  Thoughts?

Additionally, I definitely understand and agree with your concern to
conserve space within the WHOIS output results.

-gc

-----Original Message-----
From: ginny listman [mailto:ginny at arin.net]
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 11:38 AM
To: geoffrey camps
Cc: dbwg at arin.net
Subject: RE: [dbwg] WHOIS Modification - Part 1 of 2




On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, geoffrey camps wrote:

> I find it odd that ARIN requests templates using different data fields
than
> they actually use when displaying the records in WHOIS.
>
> We're required to submit to ARIN (template example):
> 5a. Customer Address: 2304 - 2nd Ave
> 6. Customer City: Seattle
> 7. Customer State/Province: WA
> 8. Customer Postal Code: 98121
>

The primary reason we do not display each field separately is to conserve
space. This may not be an issue when querying an org or poc, but if we
provide the full address for networks where there is already a long
display, the output will on average, be 4-5 lines longer. Also, there are
many records that have NULL city, state/province and postal codes, so
there is the possibility these fields would be blank.

> ***with my additional suggestion the City/Region line would further be
> modified to:
>
> City/Region: Toronto, Ont, M7A 1L2
>

Currently, there are about 400 orgs with commas in their city. There are
about 600 POCs with the same problem. Most (if not all) are errors. Using
a comma will cause parsing problems until these are cleaned up. Going
forward, commas are currently valid characters for these fields. It would
not take much for us to change this, just pointing out that it would need
to be done. The other possibility it to use a different delimiter.


Ginny