This guide details the allowed and valid characters when you need to create a domain name (up to 63 characters) with Infomaniak.

Preamble

• The allowed characters in a domain name are determined by the technical standards defined by the domain name regulatory body, generally the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) at the global level, and by national or regional regulatory bodies, such as the French Domain Name Regulatory Authority (AFNIC) for .fr domains in France.
• To understand the possibilities offered at the level of an email address itself (distinct part coming before the at sign @), refer to this other guide.

Special characters, accents (punnycode)...

In general, the characters allowed in a domain name include:

• the letters of the alphabet (a to z)
• the digits (0 to 9)
• the hyphen (-) but these hyphens are allowed provided they are not placed at the beginning or the end

There are also domain extensions that allow the use of accented characters or other special characters. These rules may vary depending on the specific domain extension (such as .fr, .com, .net, etc.) and the policies established by the relevant regulatory bodies.

It is possible to purchase from Infomaniak a domain name containing an accent on a letter (é for example). This encoding method that allows the inclusion of non-Latin characters, such as accented, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc., in domain names is called Punnycode. It transforms Unicode characters into an ASCII form readable by computer systems. This means that a domain name containing non-ASCII characters is transformed into an ASCII string starting with xn--.

This transformation is reversible with some software/email clients that can in this case interpret and correctly display the original domain name. But in general, Infomaniak does not recommend the use of email on domain names with accents:

And the dot?

A domain name is structured in several labels separated by dots. Example: example.com where com is the TLD (top-level domain) and example is the second-level domain.

Dots are reserved to separate the different parts of a domain name, such as between the second-level domain and the TLD. You cannot purchase a domain with a dot at the beginning or end of a label, or as an isolated character within a label.