Easily convert internationalized domain names (IDN) to Punycode and back. Our free tool helps you encode or decode Unicode domains for full DNS compatibility
An IDN Punycode converter translates internationalized domain names (IDNs), domains with characters outside A–Z such as münchen.de or 例え.jp, into the ASCII form DNS actually uses, and back again. The ASCII form starts each converted label with xn--: münchen.de becomes xn--mnchen-3ya.de. Conversion happens in your browser.
xn-- domain, enter it in ASCII Punycode string and click Convert to IDN Unicode.Each label (the parts between dots) is converted separately; labels that are already plain ASCII are left as they are. Letters are converted to lowercase first, because domain names are case-insensitive.
DNS was designed for ASCII letters, digits and hyphens. Rather than change every DNS server, IDNs are stored as Punycode (defined in RFC 3492) and browsers convert them for display. You need the xn-- form when you:
xn-- form.Some characters from other scripts look identical to Latin letters, so a domain can imitate a well-known brand: Cyrillic а looks like Latin a. Converting a suspicious domain to Punycode exposes the trick, because an all-Latin domain has no xn-- labels. Browsers show the Punycode form in the address bar when they detect mixed scripts for the same reason.
It marks a label that contains Punycode, the ASCII encoding of a name with non-ASCII characters. Decode it here to see the original characters.
No. Punycode is used only for domain names. The path and query parts of a URL use percent-encoding instead, so a URL with non-ASCII characters can use both.
Each registry decides which scripts and characters it accepts, and IDNA rules exclude symbols such as most emoji. A name that converts here may still be refused by the registry.