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Network Working Group A. Costello Request for Comments: 3492 Univ. of California, Berkeley Category: Standards Track March 2003 Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) Status of this Memo This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved. Abstract Punycode is a simple and efficient transfer encoding syntax designed for use with Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). It uniquely and reversibly transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string. ASCII characters in the Unicode string are represented literally, and non-ASCII characters are represented by ASCII characters that are allowed in host name labels (letters, digits, and hyphens). This document defines a general algorithm called Bootstring that allows a string of basic code points to uniquely represent any string of code points drawn from a larger set. Punycode is an instance of Bootstring that uses particular parameter values specified by this document, appropriate for IDNA. Table of Contents 1. Introduction...............................................2 1.1 Features..............................................2 1.2 Interaction of protocol parts.........................3 2. Terminology................................................3 3. Bootstring description.....................................4 3.1 Basic code point segregation..........................4 3.2 Insertion unsort coding...............................4 3.3 Generalized variable-length integers..................5 3.4 Bias adaptation.......................................7 4. Bootstring parameters......................................8 5. Parameter values for Punycode..............................8 6. Bootstring algorithms......................................9 Costello Standards Track [Page 1]  RFC 3492 IDNA Punycode March 2003 6.1 Bias adaptation function.............................10 6.2 Decoding procedure...................................11 6.3 Encoding procedure...................................12 6.4 Overflow handling....................................13 7. Punycode examples.........................................14 7.1 Sample strings.......................................14 7.2 Decoding traces......................................17 7.3 Encoding traces......................................19 8. Security Considerations...................................20 9. References................................................21 9.1 Normative References.................................21 9.2 Informative References...............................21 A. Mixed-case annotation.....................................22 B. Disclaimer and license....................................22 C. Punycode sample implementation............................23 Author's Address.............................................34 Full Copyright Statement.....................................35 1. Introduction [IDNA] describes an architecture for supporting internationalized domain names. Labels containing non-ASCII characters can be represented by ACE labels, which begin with a special ACE prefix and contain only ASCII characters. The remainder of the label after the prefix is a Punycode encoding of a Unicode string satisfying certain constraints. For the details of the prefix and constraints, see [IDNA] and [NAMEPREP]. Punycode is an instance of a more general algorithm called Bootstring, which allows strings composed from a small set of "basic" code points to uniquely represent any string of code points drawn from a larger set. Punycode is Bootstring with particular parameter values appropriate for IDNA. 1.1 Features Bootstring has been designed to have the following features: * Completeness: Every extended string (sequence of arbitrary code points) can be represented by a basic string (sequence of basic code points). Restrictions on what strings are allowed, and on length, can be imposed by higher layers. * Uniqueness: There is at most one basic string that represents a given extended string. * Reversibility: Any extended string mapped to a basic string can be recovered from that basic string. Costello Standards Track [Page 2]  RFC 3492 IDNA Punycode March 2003 * Efficient encoding: The ratio of basic string length to extended string length is small. This is important in the context of domain names because RFC 1034 [RFC1034] restricts the length of a domain label to 63 characters. * Simplicity: The encoding and decoding algorithms are reasonably simple to implement. The goals of efficiency and simplicity are at odds; Bootstring aims at a good balance between them. * Readability: Basic code points appearing in the extended string are represented as themselves in the basic string (although the main purpose is to improve efficiency, not readability). Punycode can also support an additional feature that is not used by the ToASCII and ToUnicode operations of [IDNA]. When extended strings are case-folded prior to encoding, the basic string can use mixed case to tell how to convert the folded string into a mixed-case string. See appendix A "Mixed-case annotation". 1.2 Interaction of protocol parts Punycode is used by the IDNA protocol [IDNA] for converting domain labels into ASCII; it is not designed for any other purpose. It is explicitly not designed for processing arbitrary free text. 2. Terminology The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, RFC 2119 [RFC2119]. A code point is an integral value associated with a character in a coded character set. As in the Unicode Standard [UNICODE], Unicode code points are denoted by "U+" followed by four to six hexadecimal digits, while a range of code points is denoted by two hexadecimal numbers separated by "..", with no prefixes. The operators div and mod perform integer division; (x div y) is the quotient of x divided by y, discarding the remainder, and (x mod y) is the remainder, so (x div y) * y + (x mod y) == x. Bootstring uses these operators only with nonnegative operands, so the quotient and remainder are always nonnegative. The break statement jumps out of the innermost loop (as in C). Costello Standards Track [Page 3]  RFC 3492 IDNA Punycode March 2003 An overflow is an attempt to compute a value that exceeds the maximum value of an integer variable. 3. Bootstring description Bootstring represents an arbitrary sequence of code points (the "extended string") as a sequence of basic code points (the "basic string"). This section describes the representation. Section 6 "Bootstring algorithms" presents the algorithms as pseudocode. Sections 7.1 "Decoding traces" and 7.2 "Encoding traces" trace the algorithm