What is an IDN domain?

All domain names are stored in ASCII characters (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - the American standard code for information exchange. These characters include the characters of the English alphabet (AZ, az), numbers 0-9, and punctuation marks. However, not all Internet users speak English, so remembering a domain name in English letters may not be easier for them, and sometimes more difficult, than a sequence of 12 digits of an IP address. In order to facilitate the process of remembering domain names for users from non-English-speaking countries, IDN domains were put into operation.

IDN is an abbreviation for Internationalized Domain Names . It refers to domain names that contain 1 or more non-English characters. Thus, all Internet users can register a domain in their native language. For users from Russian-speaking countries, Cyrillic IDNs are relevant - that is, domain names written with letters of the Russian or Ukrainian alphabet. At the same time, the name must contain characters specific to a certain language (that is, those that are absent in English). For Russian, these are: д, ж, и, й, л, п, ф, ц, ч, ш, щ, ъ, ы, е, ю, я, ё .

When using this type of URL with Cyrillic characters, its link is converted to punnycode , according to the ASCII Compatible Encoding standardization, which is not supported by all software products. That is why when copying in the browser line or in your FTP client, you may receive a set of incomprehensible characters. You can find more detailed information at the link below: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode