On Apr 23, 2015, at 9:41 AM, George Michaelson <ggm@apnic.net> wrote:

Other consumers of the WHOIS could feel differently about it.

Aren’t other consumers of the RIPE Whois systems doing IRR mirroring? Would the data stores of those systems store UTF-8 without croaking? I do not know what types of data stores are used for the various IRRs, but I’ve certainly witnessed relational databases setup for ASCII/Latin1 that would throw errors if told to store UTF-8. I know that our IRR only stores Latin1 (though we don’t mirror).

-andy