CODEWITHSUNDEEP
httpurlhyperlinkdnsurlencode
Andrew
Andrew

Reputation: 349

Special symbols in URLs

I've just come across this URL for AngelList - http://✌.com/. It's got a weird symbol in it and it redirects to https://angel.co/. Anyone know how this works? I didn't think you could use symbols like this in URLs.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2249

Answers (2)

Stan
Stan

Reputation: 6295

Non ASCII symbols (UTF-8) are converted to Punycode (see bellow), so http://✌.com/ is converted (encoded) to http://xn--7bi.com/. Owner of this domain set redirection (status of response is 301 Moved Permanently), so you land to https://angel.co/.

Punycode is a encoding syntax by which a Unicode (UTF-8) string of characters can be translated into the basic ASCII-characters permitted in network host names. Punycode is used for internationalized domain names, in short IDN or IDNA (Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications).

For example, when you would type café.com in your browser, your browser (which is the IDNA-enabled application) first converts the string to punycode "xn--caf-dma.com", because the character 'é' is not allowed in regular domain names. Punycode domains won't work in older browsers.

(source of quotation and Punycode encoder/decoder)

This conversion is described in RFC 3490.

Upvotes: 3

Kylar
Kylar

Reputation: 9334

It's uncommon, but not impossible. The browser or client URL-Encodes (also called percent encoding) the URL before sending it, so that special characters are transferred properly.

You can read more about URL's here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986

Upvotes: 0

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