Convert an international domain name (with accents, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc.) to its ASCII Punycode form, or decode an xn-- domain back to Unicode.
DNS was designed for ASCII only. International Domain Names (IDN) - domains with accents, umlauts, or non-Latin scripts like Cyrillic, Arabic, or Chinese - are transparently encoded into an ASCII-compatible form (Punycode, prefixed with xn--) before they're published in DNS. Browsers convert back to Unicode for display, which is also why lookalike domains using foreign characters (an IDN homograph attack) can be hard to spot by eye.
xn-- form to confirm before purchase.xn-- link here to see what it actually spells out in Unicode.Once you have the ASCII form of a domain, you can look up its records like any other domain.
Read the DNS WikiDNS itself only understands ASCII. International Domain Names (IDNs), domains using accents, umlauts, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, or any non-Latin script, are transparently encoded into an ASCII-compatible form called Punycode (prefixed with xn--) before they are published in DNS or looked up by resolvers. Browsers convert back to the readable Unicode form for display, which is exactly why the two forms need converting back and forth when debugging.
That same transparent conversion is also what makes IDN homograph attacks possible: characters from different scripts can look identical to a human eye (a Cyrillic а versus a Latin a, for example) while being completely different domains once decoded. Converting a suspicious xn-- link to its Unicode form is a quick way to see what it actually spells out.
If you need related checks, try Check DNS propagation check online and Check A record online.
That is the Punycode (ASCII-compatible) form of an international domain name you registered. It is the form actually stored in DNS zone files and used by resolvers; the accented or non-Latin form is only a display convenience in browsers and registrar dashboards.
Yes. DNS record names, including the ones you would enter into any of the record lookup tools on this site, need the ASCII/Punycode form for a non-ASCII domain. Convert first, then use that value.
This is how browsers render IDNs: the readable Unicode form is shown for legitimate, recognized scripts, while the underlying address is still Punycode. Some browsers show the raw xn-- form instead specifically to reduce the risk of homograph spoofing for less common or mixed-script domains.
Yes, this is the basis of IDN homograph phishing. Visually identical characters from different alphabets decode to entirely different xn-- addresses. If a link looks right but something feels off, decode it and compare the actual Punycode value.
The domain part of an email address follows the same DNS rules and gets Punycode-encoded the same way. The local part (before the @) uses a related but separate standard (EAI) that not all mail servers support yet.
No, they solve different problems. Punycode encodes a domain name's characters for DNS specifically. URL encoding (percent-encoding) handles special characters in the rest of a URL, like the path or query string, and uses a completely different scheme.