What special characters can you use in a domain name?

by amelia jade Nov 11, 2007 7:18PM PST

I'm trying to set up a domain name, but I'm having problems. Most of the names I would like to use are already taken. I know you can use an underscore (_) in a domain name and a dash (-). Are there any other special characters I can use. Specifically, I'd like to use the single quote (') to use Amelia's.

Thanks,
Amelia

Discussion is locked

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special characters

by v_2vinch Nov 11, 2007 7:35PM PST

The only valid characters for a domain name are letters, numbers and a hyphen "-". Other special characters like the underscore "_" or an exclamation mark "!" are NOT permitted.

For example: your name.com is incorrect because no spaces are allowed and your-name.com is correct.

A domain name can be up to 67 characters long -- including the 4 characters used to identify the Top Level Domain (.net, .com or .org). Do not type the "www." before your domain name when registering.

vc

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Thank You!

by amelia jade Nov 12, 2007 1:09PM PST

Thanks very much for your reply. It is valuable information for me. Now I can choose a good domain name.

Amelia

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not quite acurate (Internationalized domain names)

by barleysinger Oct 20, 2014 7:55AM PDT

A number of top level domains have allowed other charaters since 1998.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

And it is very likely that language groups that use non-english alphabets (Chinese, Japanese, Greek, etc) will soom ne able to petition ICAN for allowing their charater sets to be a part of domain names. At least half of the people who use the web do not know english and have another charater set for their written language.

Honestly, aside from not using the special charters (like @ . and there has never been any rational reason for the character restrictions placed on qualiifed domain names. This is another mess created by ICAN when it was run as a private USA controled club, in which most of the powerful people were barly technically literate.

Incidentally it is also very common (due to there not being a set of standard libraries or web sites onecan use to qualify an email as valid) for applications and web sites to refuse to allow email addresses where the user name contains a PERIOD oir UNDERSCORE (completely legal) or where the qualified domiain has a MINUS in it.