RACE encoding is a method for encoding foreign languages that use non-English characters (Chinese, Japanese, etc.) in

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

characters for storage in

domain name system The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

servers.http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idn-race-03 Row-based ASCII Compatible Encoding for IDN All names without non-English characters are unchanged. RACE codes are made up of digits, letters and dashes."Definition of: RACE encoding"
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PC Mag Encyclopedia
/ref> RACE encoding is part of the larger scheme of the

Universal Character Set The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, ''Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)'' (plus amendments to that standard), whi ...

specifically the ISO/IEC 10646. The assignment of characters also coincides with

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

. Today, it is mostly abandoned in favor of

punycode Punycode is a representation of Unicode with the limited ASCII character subset used for Internet hostnames. Using Punycode, host names containing Unicode characters are transcoded to a subset of ASCII consisting of letters, digits, and hyphens, wh ...

Nomenclature

RACE is an acronym for its main purpose. *R stands for Row-based *A for ASCII *C for Compatible *E Encoding

References

External links

Acmqueue.com
DNS Complexity,

Paul Vixie Paul Vixie is an American computer scientist whose technical contributions include Domain Name System (DNS) protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open s ...

, ACM Queue Domain Name System {{www-stub