I'm actually not sure about this patch. While the final solution is correct, I'm actually considering whether it's a better idea to reset the adapter to the Standard adapter instead of implementing an if condition in every single adapter.

What about updating lookup in the Base adapter?

def lookup(string)
  buffer_start do |buffer|
    request(options[:host] ? string : formatted_string(string))
    Whois::Record.new(self, buffer)
  end
end

With formatted_string returning string by default, but defined for adapters that need a different format - i.e. "=#{string}" in the case of Verisign. That way, the referral logic for each adapter can still be used.

Nevermind, that was a bad idea. You're right - it'd be better to just fall back to Standard if the custom hostname doesn't match the guessed server. That would handle the referrals too.

Here's a general solution using the Standard adapter. Hopefully this is on the right track.

There are no tests attached to this patch, but I believe because this is a work-in-progress prototype.

I'm not a big fan of this implementation. It has some drawbacks.

1. If you pass an host along with an unsupported TLD, it will fail. For example

   ruby-whois google.va -h whois.holygrail.va
   

2. It will fail if the object is not recognized. For example, if you try to pass a formatted query.

I have to think a little bit about a possible solution. In my opinion, a possible approach would be to change the .guess method itself to return a standard adapter whenever an host is passed. But this is just an hypothesis.

The best approach is probably to write some test cases and use TDD to satisfy the requirements.

I'm closing this for now, as I'm not really convinced it's the best approach. The first step, in any case, is to fix #440 and #245