The valid characters for a domain name under .CL are those contained in any of the following two sets:
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -
This set is called LDH (letters-digits-hyphen) and are the characters traditionally allowed in domain names.á é í ó ú ü ñ
This is an additional set of characters for the Spanish language. A domain name that contains any of these characters is called IDN (for "Internationalized Domain Name").
It is not allowed to register domain names that begin with the prefix xn--, nor any other prefix containing two hyphens in the third and fourth positions.
A domain name can not begin nor end with a hyphen (-).
The system does not distinguish between upper and lower-case characters, which will be considered to be equivalent.
To be used on the Internet, IDN domain names must be subject to an encoding process called ACE (ASCII-Compatible Encoding), as described in RFC3490. NIC Chile provides a tool, available at:
http://www.nic.cl/cgi-bin/idntool.pl
This is to allow users to observe the effect of this conversion. It should be noted that, even though some programs used in the Internet, in particular some browsers, already implement IDN and effect this conversion automatically, others still do not. For this reason, until this technology is more widely deployed, it is possible that users may, sometimes, see the ACE encoding for a given domain name instead of the original IDN form.The maximum length allowed for a domain name under .CL is 63 characters. Users must be aware that for IDN names this limit applies to the ACE encoded version, not to the original name. In general, this means that the actual number of available characters decreases.
The list of admissible characters for domain names under .CL may be enlarged in the future, to adapt the system to the evolving needs of the community.
NIC Chile.
August 2005
Frequently Asked Questions (in spanish), see: http://www.nic.cl/ayuda/faq/index.html#idn.
