This guide details the allowed and prohibited characters when creating a domain name (up to 63 characters) with Infomaniak.

Preamble

• The allowed characters in a domain name are determined by the technical standards established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and, where applicable, by national or regional regulatory bodies, such as AFNIC for .fr domains.
• To understand the possibilities offered at the level of an email address (part before the at sign @), consult this other guide.

Allowed characters in a domain name

The allowed characters in standard domain names include:

Special characters, accents (punnycode)

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 a domain name containing an accent on a letter (é for example) from Infomaniak. This coding method, which allows the inclusion of non-Latin characters, such as accented, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc., in domain names, is called Punnycode. It converts 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 character 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:

Prohibited characters in a domain name

The following characters (dot, space, exclamation mark, hash, dollar, percent, caret, ampersand, asterisk, parenthesis, equal sign, bracket, chevron, comma, quotation marks, slash, semicolon, question mark) are not allowed in Infomaniak domain names: