Calling InetGetHostAddress with non-ANSI chars in host name

[Bob Brandin]

Is there any issue with calling InetGetHostAddress with a hostname containing non-ANSI characters? We have a machine name with Chinese characters that fails with an "invalid host name/unable to resolve" error. Thanks.

[Technical Support]

Domain names can only use a subset of ASCII characters, specifically letters, numbers and the hyphen. This is a fundamental part of the Domain Name System (DNS) since it was created. For domains that use non-ASCII characters (e.g.: Chinese), they have to be "encoded" so that they conform to the character set permitted by DNS. For more information, you can read about Internationalized Domain Names here. We don't have any direct support for that conversion and ultimately the call to InetGetHostAddress is passed to the Windows Sockets API to resolve the domain name, so the conversion using puny-code is something that you'd have to manage in your own code.