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by funwares 1580 days ago
Does anyone know what's up with the "xn--*" TLDs? e.g. xn--pssy2u

I didn't know TLDs could have dashes or maybe I'm misunderstanding these.

1 comments

Any domain that contains a letter in a language-specific alphabet other than English, such as Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Tamil, Chinese or a Latin alphabet using a character with an accents, such as Spanish, Danish or French. These are stored in the Domain Name System as ascii strings using an endcoding mechanism called Punycode.

So the domain fĂȘnĂȘtre.com translates to xn--fentre-kva.com in punnycode.

All encoded domains form an ascii string starting xn-- but when displayed in a browser, display in their native language alphabet.