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

Introduction

• The characters allowed 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 for an email address (the part before the at symbol @), see 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 from Infomaniak that contains an accent on a letter (é for example). This encoding method, which allows the inclusion of non-Latin characters, such as accented, Cyrillic, Chinese characters, etc., in domain names, is called Punycode. It transforms Unicode characters into a form of ASCII that is readable by computer systems. This means that a domain name containing non-ASCII characters is transformed into an ASCII string that begins with xn--.

This transformation is reversible with certain software/email clients, which can then correctly interpret and display the original domain name. However, in general, Infomaniak does not recommend using email with domain names that contain accented characters:

Characters not allowed in a domain name

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