IDN Punycode Converter

About this calculator

An internationalized domain name (IDN) lets domains use non-ASCII characters — accented Latin letters, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese and more — but the underlying Domain Name System only understands ASCII, so browsers and registries convert Unicode labels to and from ASCII using Punycode, an encoding defined in RFC 3492 and wrapped with the xn-- prefix under the ToASCII/ToUnicode rules of RFC 3490 (superseded by RFC 5891). For example, “münchen.de” becomes “xn--mnchen-3ya.de” in its ASCII-compatible form.

Domain registrars, browser address bars, and DNS resolvers rely on this conversion behind the scenes every time a non-Latin-script domain is registered or visited, and developers or domain buyers use converters like this one to check exactly what ASCII string a given Unicode domain resolves to (useful for spotting homograph look-alike domains) or to read a Punycode string back into its human-readable Unicode form. Enter a domain name and pick a direction to convert.