TXT Record

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Nitin" == Nitin Khurana <nkhurana at novell.com> writes:

    Nitin> Subject : Is there a way to internationalize the data in
    Nitin> the TXT records.

    Nitin> By default whenever we send some data to any DNS server for
    Nitin> the TXT record it interprets that data as ASCII, i.e. even
    Nitin> if I send a stream of bytes in the data section of a TXT
    Nitin> update packet that would be interpreted as ascii and each
    Nitin> byte will be converted into its ascii equivalent and that
    Nitin> is what will be returned to me (as an ascii string)
    Nitin> whenever I query the record.

The DNS protocol allows you to put whatever you want in a TXT record,
provided it uses no more than 64k (less DNS overhead for labels, class
and RR type). The protocol is 8-bit clean. Perhaps you're using tools
that aren't 8-bit clean to update and display your zone files? You'd
need to invent some way of identifying the character set used in a
given TXT record and get each application to convert between that and
the alphabet used locally.(*) There's nothing in the DNS protocol for
this and that conversion job doesn't belong in a name server anyway.
You might also consider the work that's been done on Internationalised
Domain Names (IDN). Though that is intended for representing domain
names -- not the content of TXT records -- in non-latin alphabets. It
should give you an idea of the scope of the problem, if nothing else.

(*) RFC1035 says "TXT RRs are used to hold descriptive text. The
semantics of the text depends on the domain where it is found." So
maybe you could have names like utf8.foo or unicode.foo for TXT
records that contain data using those respective character encodings?