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IDN Punycode Converter

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Domain names can be converted to and from IDN and Punycode format.

How do you convert an internationalized domain into Punycode format?

By using the IDN Punycode converter tool on this page, you can instantly convert any international domain name, email address or URL and encode or decode it into the Punycode equivalent format. All you need to do is enter either the IDN format or the Punycode format and press the convert button.

The tool will automatically convert in both directions and display both Punycode encoded ASCII format as well as the Unicode UTF-8 decoded format.

What is an IDN?

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is a domain name which contains characters from languages like Chinese written in Hanzi or Japanese Kanji, Russian, Thai and Korean, as well as characters containing diacritics or ligatures like French among others which contain non-ASCII characters. These characters are encoded by computers, phones & tablets as multibyte Unicode characters and are stored in the Domain Name System (DNS) in an ASCII-only format known as Punycode.

An example IDN may look like:

도메인.com

What is Punycode?

Punycode is way of representing Unicode characters used in internationalized domain names in a format containing ASCII-only characters. The converted internationalized domain name format can be stored in the Domain Name System (DNS) and is resolved during the DNS lookup process.

Punycode format contains a subset of ASCII characters which include letters, numbers and hyphens.

To avoid conflicts with standard domain names which also include only these characters, Punycode formatted domains are prefixed with xn--.

An example Punycode converted domain may look like:

xn--hq1bm8jm9l.com

IDN Punycode example domain names

There are many different types of inputs which can be converted into Punycode format, this includes domains, email addresses and full URLs in many different languages as well as special characters like emoji domain names.

When is using Punycode format needed?

A Punycode encoded domain name format is required when configurating domain name DNS records.

This is also the required format for hostnames stored in your systems hosts file.

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