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(this is a historic page, saved from the old BerliOS site before it was shut down)

The Problem

Many TLDs allow only a restricted set of Unicode characters for registering Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). These restriction tables are not available at a central place, are somewhat volatile and often have vague copyright notices. GNU Libidn is a standard library for handling IDNs that supports testing for valid characters specified in definition files for each TLD since version 0.4.0. The nature of this library, both as an FSF project and as a reliable IDNA reference implementation, and the volatility of the the allowable character sets results in an incomplete and not necessary up to date set of checking tables being included in the standard distribution.

The Solution

A site for collecting this info at a central location, to make it instantly available for use and contribution (please send me tables for TLDs not yet included here), to solve copyright problems, do version tracking and generally prepare tables for a possible later inclusion in the standard Libidn distribution.

Get the tables directly from CVS, or download packaged versions, report bugs, read news etc. at the Berlios project page. Installation HOWTO

• 1. Get Libidn(>=0.4.0), unpack it to some directory
• 2. Get the TLD checking tables provided at this site, unpack them into the doc directory of Libidn, so that the *.tld files etc. are placed in directory doc/tld
• 3. Modify doc/tld/Makefile.am to include the tld-files you want
• 4. Delete the file lib/tlds.c from Libidn
• 5. Make sure you have automake 1.9, autoconf 2.59, libtool 1.5, texinfo 4.7
• 6. Configure and compile as usual, making sure to not disable tld checking support

If you want to install this patched library on more than one system now, "make dist" will produce a tar.gz archive that contains the updated TLD tables (you might want use --enable-gtk-doc with ./configure for this to work), and that can be installed anywhere in the usual fashion without requiring any manual patching.

Last change: 23 Jun 2005, Thomas Jacob, Internet24.de