Using International (Non-Latin) Domain Names in cPanel
There is a special type of domain names called internationalized domain names (IDN). They may be difficult to type using a standard keyboard or to enter into a text field on the web. In this tutorial, we are going to see how to add an internationalized domain name (IDN) in cPanel. You may need to add such domain names when trying to create an addon domain or parked domain on cPanel.
What is an Internationalized (Non-Latin) domain name?
An internationalized domain name (IDN) can be defined as a domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Tamil, Hebrew or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics or ligatures, such as French. These systems are used to be encoded using multi-byte Unicode.
What is Multi-Byte Character Set?
The Multi-Byte Character Set is a type of character set where a character is encoded using more than one byte. Common character sets such as ANSI or ASCII character sets are not using more than one byte for a character so that they are not of MBCS type. The UTF-8 is a Multi-Byte Character Set because it uses 4 bytes to encode a character. It encodes any Unicode character as a sequence of 1,2,3 or 4 bytes.
These internationalized domain names (IDN) are used to be stored as Punycode transcription in DNS. These will be in the form of ASCII strings.
What is Punycode?
The DNS supports only a limited character set (A-Z, 0-9). This is usually not enough to represent the IDNs. This is why we need the Punycode. The Punycode is a way to represent the IDNs using the limited character set.
How to use IDNs on cPanel?
To use an IDN on cPanel, we need to convert the IP address to the corresponding Punycode first. There are many free Punycode converters are available on the web.
Eg: Below is an example of an IDN and its corresponding Punycode.
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IDN: Ðôáìñ.tld Punycode: xn--1cawkgm.tld
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