How do I register a domain with special symbols or characters?

Question

Daring Fireball tweeted:

‘We Don’t Lie to Google’: http://✪df.ws/e4f

I've been thinking about creating a url shortener and a short url similar to http://✪df.ws/ would be ideal as no one will ever have to manually type the symbol.

I tried to register a domain with a heart ♥ on a few of the more popular domain name registrars, but upon submitting I was told that the domain name contained invalid characters.

How do I search and register a domain with one of these symbols or characters?

Solution 1

Check out Iwantmyname. It's possible for .WS and .LA as far as I know.

Solution 2

As mentioned above, an internationalized domain name (IDN) allows the inclusion of language-specific characters. You can use this tool to see how such names are mapped into regular ASCII domain names that begin with the special xn-- followed by regular characters, followed by an encoding to insert special characters within the regular ones. For example: xn--nol-kma.com is the ascii mapping of noël.com when the nol is the normal part and the kma specifies to insert the ë between the second and third characters of nol to give noël.

Solution 3

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name. First of all, many characters are not permitted in IDNS. Secondly, the recent announcement is that registration will open for a limited set of IDNS names in a few months, not now.

Solution 4

Well it’s possible to use special characters or symbols into a domain name, there are some stuff that your might know before using. There are some symbols like æ, å, ø, ä or ö which are known as “Punycode” an Internet standard. These characters are not identifiable for ordinary browser as it requires a specific browser package.

However it’s a complicated thing to implement and not beneficial at all. In normal condition, hyphen "-" is the only allowed character which is readable by any browser directly and is typically used to isolate two words in a domain name for example (best-domain.com). Some people remain confused in hyphen and underscore "_" but underscore or any other special character are not permitted. A domain name can be 67 characters long with 4 character domain extension.

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