The top-level domain (TLD) of interest here is: XN—MGBPL2FH. This is an internationalized country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. The string “XN—MGBPL2FH” is an encoded form, using a system called “Punycode”, which allows non-ASCII (the 128-character American Standard Code for Information Interchange set) characters within internet host names.
This specific TLD .xn—mgbpl2fh, represents the country Sudan in the Arabic script. In Arabic, it is spelled as ‘سودان’, which is converted into Punycode (a method used to represent Internationalized Domain Names using only ASCII characters) to form the alphanumeric string ‘XN—MGBPL2FH’. To put it more simply, the Punycode, ‘XN—MGBPL2FH’, is the ASCII-compatible representation of the Arabic script ccTLD for Sudan.
The creation and delegation of such internationalized country code domains are a part of an effort by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to expand domain access for countries that use non-Latin alphabets. This initiative aims to increase language accessibility and inclusivity, allowing scripts from all over the world to be used for internet addresses.
A technical description of the process is like this: hostnames are composed of labels separated by dots, and each label must be encoded by Punycode if it contains non-ASCII characters. Punycode is a way to represent Unicode within the limited character subset of ASCII. When a label is converted into Punycode, it’s prefixed with ‘xn—’, followed by the encoded label. This is why we see ‘xn—’ at the beginning of the internationalized domain names, signifying that the following characters are a Punycode encoded string.
Besides this specific IDN ccTLD, there are many examples of other internationalized TLDs. For example, the IDN ccTLD for Russia is ‘xn—p1ai’ (represented as ‘рф’ in Cyrillic), while that for China is ‘xn—fiqs8s’ (represented as ‘中国’ in Chinese characters).
This information is compiled from recognized and reliable sources, such as the ICANN’s database of assigned TLDs and RFC 3492 for the Punycode specification, which is available through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Sources:
1. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
(https://www.icann.org/)
1. IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
(https://www.ietf.org/)
