SYNOPSIS

       use strict;
       use warnings;
       use POE qw(Component::Client::Whois);
       use Data::Dumper;
    
       POE::Session->create(
            package_states => [
                    'main' => [ qw(_start _response) ],
            ],
       );
    
       $poe_kernel->run();
       exit 0;
    
       sub _start {
         my ($kernel,$heap) = @_[KERNEL,HEAP];
    
         POE::Component::Client::Whois->whois( host => "whois.nic.uk",
                                               query => 'bingosnet.co.uk',
                                               event => '_response',
                                               _arbitary => [ qw(moo moo moo) ] );
         undef;
       }
    
       sub _response {
          print STDERR Dumper( $_[ARG0] );
       }

DESCRIPTION

    POE::Component::Client::Whois provides a lightweight one shot
    non-blocking RFC 812 WHOIS query to other POE sessions and components.
    The component will attempt to guess the appropriate whois server to
    connect to based on the query string passed.

    If no guess can be made it will connect to whois.internic.net for
    domains, whois.arin.net for IPv4 addresses and whois.6bone.net for IPv6
    addresses.

CONSTRUCTOR

    whois

      Creates a POE::Component::Client::Whois session. Takes two mandatory
      arguments and a number of optional:

        'query', the string query to send to the whois server; # Mandatory
        'event', the event name to emit on success/failure; # Mandatory
        'port', the port on the whois server to connect to, defaults to 43;
        'session', a session or alias to send the above 'event' to, defaults to calling session;
        'host', the whois server to query; # Automagically determined by the component
        'referral', indicates to the poco whether to follow ReferralServer; # Default is 1
        'referral_only', indicates whether the poco should only return the results of querying
                         the referral server; # default is 0

      One can also pass arbitary data to whois() which will be passed back
      in the response event. It is advised that one uses an underscore
      prefix to avoid clashes with future versions.

OUTPUT

    ARG0 will be a hashref, which contains the original parameters passed
    to whois() ( including any arbitary data ), plus either one of the
    following two keys:

      'reply', an arrayref of response lines from the whois server, assuming no error occurred;
      'error', in lieu of a valid response, this will be defined with a brief description of
               what went wrong;

    No parsing is undertaken on the returned data, this is an exercise left
    to the reader >;]

KUDOS

    ketas, for first suggesting this module; buu, decay and hazard from
    #perl @ freenode, for helpful suggestions;

    This module is based on the linux whois client from
    http://www.linux.it/~md/software/.

SEE ALSO

    RFC 812 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc812.html.