Hello Ronald,
On 2 Nov 2019, at 21:55, Ronald F. Guilmette via db-wg <db-wg@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