This guide details the accepted and valid characters when you need to create a domain name (up to 63 characters) with Infomaniak.

Preamble

• The allowed characters in a domain name are determined by the technical standards defined by the domain name regulatory body, generally the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) globally, and by national or regional regulatory bodies, such as the French Domain Name Regulatory Authority (AFNIC) for .fr domains in France.
• To understand the possibilities offered at the level of an email address itself (distinct part coming before the at sign @), refer to this other guide.

Special characters, accents (punnycode)...

In general, the characters allowed in a domain name include:

• the letters of the alphabet (a to z)
• digits (0 to 9)
• the hyphen (-) but these hyphens are allowed on the condition that they are not placed at the beginning or at the end

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 accented letter (e.g., é) from Infomaniak. This encoding method allows the inclusion of non-Latin characters, such as accented, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc., in domain names and 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 string starting with xn--.

This transformation is reversible with certain software/email clients that can, in this case, interpret and correctly display the original domain name. However, generally speaking, Infomaniak does not recommend using email on domain names with accents:

And the dot?

A domain name is structured into several labels separated by dots. Example: example.com where com is the TLD (top-level domain) and example is the second-level domain.

Periods are reserved to separate the different parts of a domain name, such as between the second-level domain and the TLD. You cannot purchase a domain with a period at the beginning or end of a label, or as an isolated character within a label.