What is punycode?
Punycode is an encoding scheme that converts international characters into ASCII format, crucial for domain names on the internet. My ”Punycode Converter” tool acts as a ”decoder” that assists users in swiftly and easily converting these encoded characters back to their original form or vice versa. Use my tool for seamless Punycode conversions; it handles bulk.
Punycoder
More on Punycode
Punycode is an encoding technique used to represent international characters in domain names using a set of characters limited to the ASCII character set. This is particularly crucial for international domain names (IDN) that may contain characters from scripts and alphabets not compatible with ASCII.
Why Punycode?
In the early days of the internet, domain names were limited to the ASCII character set, essentially consisting of English letters, numbers, and some special characters. However, with the global expansion of the internet, it became clear that there was a need to support domain names in other languages, such as Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, or Scandinavian languages.
To address this issue, international domain names (IDN) were introduced. But for these IDNs to be processed by the existing DNS system, which only handles ASCII characters, a technique was needed to convert these international characters to ASCII format. This is where Punycode comes into play.
How does Punycode work?
A domain name containing non-ASCII characters is encoded with Punycode and is given a prefix, ”xn--”, to indicate that it’s a Punycode-encoded string.
Example: If we take the Swedish word ”räksmörgås” and want to use it as part of a domain name, in Punycode, it would be represented as ”xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o”.
This allows browsers and servers to easily interpret and process the domain name while maintaining its original meaning and representation on websites and in user interfaces.