I hope this post won't be considered too far off topic. I've already sent this same question off to the guy who is the current maintainer of the Net::IDN::Punycode Perl module, but while I'm still impatiently awaiting his response I'm thinking that maybe folks here could enlighten me.
In a nutshell, I'd just like to know whether or not Punycode encoded strings may ever validly contain either (a) leading periods or else (b) two consecutive periods. Would any strings that contain either of those things be considered to be "valid" Punycode encoded strings? To be more specific and concrete about it, here is a small example Perl program I wrote: ftp://ftp.tristatelogic.com/pub/punybug.pl When *I* run this, it prints out several "Invalid punycode!" errors. (It may perhaps yield different results for other people who have different versions of the relevant Perl modules installed.) Anyway, this example program is designed and intended to print out those exact errors whenever it sees a string coming back from the encode_punycode function that contains either a leading period or else a pair of consecutive periods. The short example program (at the URL above) was derived from portions of the following test set, used for testing applications that try to make use of the Mozilla Project's so-called Public Suffix List: http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/netwerk/test/unit/data/test_psl.txt?raw=1 (See also: https://publicsuffix.org/) So anyway, either the encode_punycode function supplied by the Net::IDN::Punycode Perl module has a serious bug in it, or else there must be something really very basic about Punycode that I just don't understand. I _thought_ that the whole idea of Punycode was that random Unicode/UTF-8 strings could be encoded in a way that wouldn't give name servers, or anything else accustomed to dealing with traditional domain names heartburn. Yes? No? Anyway, although I haven't actually tried it, I do expect that my local copy of BIND would be rather unhappy with me if I were to try to give it a zone file in which some of the labels either began with periods or else contained any consecutives sequences of periods. Am I wrong about that? Regards, rfg _______________________________________________ Please visit https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users to unsubscribe from this list bind-users mailing list bind-users@lists.isc.org https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users
