A warning about parsing zone files... the grammar is deceptively tricky. While TLD registries will probably provide you with files in a sane subset[0] of that

A warning about parsing zone files... the grammar is deceptively tricky. While TLD registries will probably provide you with files in a sane subset[0] of that specified in RFC 1035, there are a number of things that will NOT work in general: - Splitting the file in to lines (paren-blocks and quoted strings can span lines, strings can contain ';' etc). - Splitting the file on whitespace (it's significant in column 1 and inside strings) - Applying a regex (you'll need lookahead for conditional matching and it'll get ugly fast) Don't go down the road of assuming it's a simple delimited file. A few references: https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/documentation.html https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/documentation.html http://www.verycomputer.com/96_5ad11cc47053d8b0_1.htm http://www.verycomputer.com/96_5ad11cc47053d8b0_1.htm [0] See page 9 of https://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/zfa-strategy-paper-12may10-en.pdf https://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/zfa-strategy-p...