Support for the Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) protocol as specified in RFC 5891. This is the latest version of the protocol and is sometimes referred to as “IDNA 2008”.
This library also provides support for Unicode Technical Standard 46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing.
This acts as a suitable replacement for the “encodings.idna” module that comes with the Python standard library, but which only supports the older superseded IDNA specification (RFC 3490).
Basic functions are simply executed:
>>> import idna >>> idna.encode('ドメイン.テスト') b'xn--eckwd4c7c.xn--zckzah' >>> print(idna.decode('xn--eckwd4c7c.xn--zckzah')) ドメイン.テスト
This package is available for installation from PyPI:
$ python3 -m pip install idna
For typical usage, the encode and decode functions will take a domain name argument and perform a conversion to A-labels or U-labels respectively.
>>> import idna >>> idna.encode('ドメイン.テスト') b'xn--eckwd4c7c.xn--zckzah' >>> print(idna.decode('xn--eckwd4c7c.xn--zckzah')) ドメイン.テスト
You may use the codec encoding and decoding methods using the idna.codec module:
>>> import idna.codec >>> print('домен.испытание'.encode('idna2008')) b'xn--d1acufc.xn--80akhbyknj4f' >>> print(b'xn--d1acufc.xn--80akhbyknj4f'.decode('idna2008')) домен.испытание
Conversions can be applied at a per-label basis using the ulabel or alabel functions if necessary:
>>> idna.alabel('测试') b'xn--0zwm56d'
As described in RFC 5895, the IDNA specification does not normalize input from different potential ways a user may input a domain name. This functionality, known as a “mapping”, is considered by the specification to be a local user-interface issue distinct from IDNA conversion functionality.
This library provides one such mapping that was developed by the Unicode Consortium. Known as Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing, it provides for both a regular mapping for typical applications, as well as a transitional mapping to help migrate from older IDNA 2003 applications. Strings are preprocessed according to Section 4.4 “Preprocessing for IDNA2008” prior to the IDNA operations.
For example, “Königsgäßchen” is not a permissible label as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K is not allowed (nor are capital letters in general). UTS 46 will convert this into lower case prior to applying the IDNA conversion.
>>> import idna >>> idna.encode('Königsgäßchen') ... idna.core.InvalidCodepoint: Codepoint U+004B at position 1 of 'Königsgäßchen' not allowed >>> idna.encode('Königsgäßchen', uts46=True) b'xn--knigsgchen-b4a3dun' >>> print(idna.decode('xn--knigsgchen-b4a3dun')) königsgäßchen
Transitional processing provides conversions to help transition from the older 2003 standard to the current standard. For example, in the original IDNA specification, the LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S (ß) was converted into two LATIN SMALL LETTER S (ss), whereas in the current IDNA specification this conversion is not performed.
>>> idna.encode('Königsgäßchen', uts46=True, transitional=True) 'xn--knigsgsschen-lcb0w'
Implementers should use transitional processing with caution, only in rare cases where conversion from legacy labels to current labels must be performed (i.e. IDNA implementations that pre-date 2008). For typical applications that just need to convert labels, transitional processing is unlikely to be beneficial and could produce unexpected incompatible results.
Function calls from the Python built-in encodings.idna module are mapped to their IDNA 2008 equivalents using the idna.compat module. Simply substitute the import clause in your code to refer to the new module name.
All errors raised during the conversion following the specification should raise an exception derived from the idna.IDNAError base class.
More specific exceptions that may be generated as idna.IDNABidiError when the error reflects an illegal combination of left-to-right and right-to-left characters in a label; idna.InvalidCodepoint when a specific codepoint is an illegal character in an IDN label (i.e. INVALID); and idna.InvalidCodepointContext when the codepoint is illegal based on its positional context (i.e. it is CONTEXTO or CONTEXTJ but the contextual requirements are not satisfied.)
The IDNA and UTS 46 functionality relies upon pre-calculated lookup tables for performance. These tables are derived from computing against eligibility criteria in the respective standards. These tables are computed using the command-line script tools/idna-data.
This tool will fetch relevant codepoint data from the Unicode repository and perform the required calculations to identify eligibility. There are three main modes:
The tool accepts a number of arguments, described using idna-data -h. Most notably, the --version argument allows the specification of the version of Unicode to be used in computing the table data. For example, idna-data --version 9.0.0 make-libdata will generate library data against Unicode 9.0.0.