A client recently asked for some domain names consisting of japanese charact
ers which we then acquired for him. I am now trying to
gather as much information as possible before setting up the appropriate zon
e files in our name server.

Would someone be willing to share some knowledge or point me somewhere infor
mative?

Thanks and cheers,
Konrad

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On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 20:33:16 +0100, "Konrad Mathieu"
<kmremovethese@wordstoavoidspamf-a-v.de> wrote:
quote:

>A client recently asked for some domain names consisting of japanese charac
ters
>which we then acquired for him. I am now trying to gather as much informati
on as
>possible before setting up the appropriate zone files in our name server.
>
>Would someone be willing to share some knowledge or point me somewhere informative?


Question: How are the domain names encoded? IIRC, DNS is restricted to the A
SCII
characterset, and there are a number of methods around to encode non-ASCII
characters (like katakana or kanji) into ASCII. I believe that there is an R
FC
covering at least one of the methods.

I ask this because your zone files will have to reflect the ASCII names, not
 the
japanese names, of the domain names, and thus the names will have to follow 
an
encoding rule.

--
Lew Pitcher
IT Consultant, Enterprise Technology Solutions
Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed are my own, not my employers')

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On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 20:16:35 GMT, Lew.Pitcher@td.com (Lew Pitcher) wrote:
quote:

>On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 20:33:16 +0100, "Konrad Mathieu"
><kmremovethese@wordstoavoidspamf-a-v.de> wrote:
> 
>
>Question: How are the domain names encoded? IIRC, DNS is restricted to the 
ASCII
>characterset, and there are a number of methods around to encode non-ASCII
>characters (like katakana or kanji) into ASCII. I believe that there is an 
RFC
>covering at least one of the methods.


It's RFC 3492 (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3492.txt)
"Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Nam
es
in Applications (IDNA)"


--
Lew Pitcher
IT Consultant, Enterprise Technology Solutions
Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed are my own, not my employers')

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

| It's RFC 3492 (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3492.txt)
| "Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain N
ames
| in Applications (IDNA)"

Thanks Lew!
So I just do a normal zone file containing the ASCII-version of the japanese
 string? Sounds pretty straight forward. I only need a
way to convert the two then.

Cheers,
Konrad

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Konrad Mathieu wrote:
quote:

> | It's RFC 3492 (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3492.txt)
> | "Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain
 Names
> | in Applications (IDNA)"
>
> Thanks Lew!


You're welcome
quote:

> So I just do a normal zone file containing the ASCII-version of the japanese string?[/colo
r]


I believe so. The web resources documenting Punycode (including the rfc)
indicate that's what you do.
quote:

> Sounds pretty straight forward. I only need a
> way to convert the two then.


The RFC includes sample code of a program to convert between Unicode and
Punycode encoded ASCII. There are also some reference implementations on the
web; Google for punycode and pick what seems appropriate to you.

Hope all this helps.

--
Lew Pitcher, IT Consultant, Application Architecture
Enterprise Technology Solutions, TD Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed here are my own, not my employer's)

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