Posted by Toby A Inkster on 02/13/07 09:48

Rik wrote:

> Yup, works. Isn't understood by a lot of programs though, most browsers
> will handle it just fine, but browsing is not the only thing we want to
> use it for.
>
> Simple example: I cannot ping this with ease in my Windows version...

There are IDN-enabled versions of ping available, but few if any operating
systems ship with them as standard yet.

Though the hope is that operating systems will integrate IDN support
directly into their own gethostbyname() type functions, so there is no
need to explicitly compile IDN support into all software that uses domain
names.

(On the other hand, many software has to parse URLs too, in which case
they'd probably need to update their URL-parsing code to cope with IDN.)

libidn exists, which makes it really easy to drop in support for
internationalised domain names into existing network apps. It's LGPL too,
which even makes it available for use by closed-source software.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

• Next in forum: Re: HTTP 403
• Prev in forum: Re: discussion: script structuring and mod_rewrite?
• Thread view: Re: preg_match() regex to validate URL

[Reply to this message]