How to Register a Domain Name using Special Characters

ChemiCloud provides you with the ability to register domain names from within your Client Area. But did you know you can register domains with special characters, like mrseñortacos.com as well?

Yep, you sure can. This is done by using Punycode. In this Knowledge Base article, we’ll cover how.

How to Register a Domain Name using Special Characters

What is Punycode?

To understand Punycode, we need to explain what Unicode and ASCII are, as Punycode is a representation of Unicode with the limited ASCII character subset used for internet domain names.

Unicode is a technology standard for consistent coding, encoding, representation, and handling of text used in most of Earth’s writing systems.

You’ve probably seen Unicode UTF-8, which is the dominant encoding on the Web, used on over 95% of websites as of 2020 and up to 100% in some languages. UTF-8 uses one byte for the first 128 code points and up to 4 bytes for other characters. The first 128 Unicode code points represent the ASCII characters, which means that any text in ASCII is also UTF-8 text.

So what is ASCII? 

ASCII was developed from telegraph code, yes it’s that old, and its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services way, way back in the day. ASCII is an abbreviation for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a character encoding standard for electronic communications. It’s most commonly referred to as US-ASCII on the Internet.

If you really want to learn more about Unicode and ASCII, you can check out this video here which explains them. For now, just remember that Punycode uses ASCII and Unicode characters to represent special characters in another language, such as this: ñ.

Registering a Domain Using Special Characters

To register a domain using special characters, you need to convert the domain to punycode. For example, mrseñortacos.com converts to xn--mrseortacos-4db.com, which you can register. Then when typing mrseñortacos.com in your browser using your special characters, the domain will resolve. 🙂

Converting Special Characters to Punycode

To convert your domains from Special Character format into the IDNA (Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications) format, you’ll need to use a Unicode to Punycode Converter.

Check and Buy Domains In Minutes!

If you have any questions, please feel free to open a ticket from your Client Area or open a chat with our Happiness Engineers 24×7 and they will be more than happy to help!