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What causes the unusual display of an umlaut domain / special character domain (IDN)?

Internationalized domain names ( IDN for short, also known colloquially as umlaut domains or special character domains) are domain names that contain language-specific special characters (ä, ö, ü, ...). These special characters were not originally provided for in the Domain Name System.

To enable servers to handle these special characters, an encoding method called Punycode was used. With this method, non-ASCII characters can be represented in the ASCII character space.

The character string "schön" thus becomes "schn-7qa" in Punycode. This is why umlaut/special character domains look "strange" in some representations.

Further information on IDN and Punycode.

  • IDN, internationalized domain name, internationalisierte Domainnamen
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