IDN

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IDN stands for international domain name. These foreign-language domain names feature a large number of letters and characters.

They include non-ASCII characters such as accents (é, è, à, etc.), as well as special characters from other languages1. The IDN includes 92 more characters than the 26 letters of the French and English alphabets, the numbers and special characters of the ASCII character code2.

You can register an IDN using either native language characters (non-ASCII characters) or the standard punycode character format (ASCII characters). Generally speaking, if you enter language characters, PlanetHoster converts them to punycode and registers the punycode version in the registry.

You can view IDN characters by adjusting your web browser’s language settings. If you cannot see the characters, you may need to install a foreign language pack (your web browser’s help section will tell you how to do this).

  1. For example, German, Chinese and Arabic. ↩︎
  2. Among others, punctuation marks, parentheses and quotation marks. ↩︎
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