Punycode
From Wacklepedia - The Free Encyclopedia
Punycode, defined in
RFC 3492, is a self-proclaimed "Bootstring encoding" of
Unicode strings into the limited character set supported by
DNS. The encoding is used as part of
IDNA, which is a system enabling the use of internationalized domain names in all languages supported by
Unicode, where the burden of translation lies entirely with the user application (e.g.,
web browser).
For example, b?her becomes bcher-kva in Punycode, and therefore the domain name b?her.ch would be represented as xn--bcher-kva.ch in IDNA.
Punycode has been adopted by the national registrars of Germany, Austria and Switzerland starting on March 1st, 2004.
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