Using International (Non-Latin) Domain Names in cPanel

Posted on December 7th, 2017

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

===

 

If you need any further help please do reach our support department.

 

 

One Response to “Using International (Non-Latin) Domain Names in cPanel”

  1. Mark Vincent Healy says:

    Hello, I have set up a domain name in Cpanel.
    IDN is óhéalaighthe.ie
    Punycode is xn--halaighthe-b7a2j.ie
    My problem is that Cpanel only stores the Punycode listing for my domain so when I want to create my email address marc@óhéalaighthe.ie using the IDN it is not provided for in Cpanel and all I can do is setup a nonsense email address like [email protected]
    Can you please help me? I have sought a solution through the host providers who use Cpanel. A2Hosting say Cpanel does not have a feature for creating an IDN domain in its UNICODE value but only in its ASCII or Punycode value.
    I would like to create email addresses in Cpanel with the IDN óhéalaighthe.ie which is my name in my native language, Gaelic or Gaelige.
    Thank you for your help. If you have a solution might I ask if I can share it with A2Hosting?
    Mark Vincent Healy

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