[db-wg] Internationalized domain names in the data abase?

Hello Ronald,

> On 2 Nov 2019, at 21:55, Ronald F. Guilmette via db-wg <db-wg at ripe.net> wrote:
> 
> Sorry if I am interrupting any ongoing discussion,  but I just
> have a quick and simple question...
> 
> Is it permitted to have internationalized domain names appear
> within the database?
> 

Currently the RIPE database supports the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character set only.

There was previous discussion in April - May 2015 to support UTF-8:

https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/db-wg/2015-April/004516.html
https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/db-wg/2015-May/004542.html

The proposal was to allow UTF-8 in free-text attributes, except for primary keys.

> By that I really mean to ask if it is permissible to have there
> appear in the data base IDNs which are written in their UTF-8
> encoded forms, rather than, say, in punycode?
> 

The RIPE database only contains reverse domain objects (i.e. to register reverse delegations).


> I have found at least one specific case where an IDN does appear
> in the data base as a UTF-8 encoded string, but since I had
> never seen that before, I just wanted to know if that was an
> anomalous mistake or if it was consider normal, acceptable,
> and routine.
> 


Please let me know in which object you found this. The DB team spent some effort recently improving (non-) Latin-1 character handling (in updates and queries), there shouldn't be any non Latin-1 characters remaining.

Regards
Ed Shryane
RIPE NCC