Punycode is a character encoding created in 2003.

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, which is called the Letter-Digit-Hyphen (LDH) subset. For example, München (German name for Munich) is encoded as Mnchen-3ya. Read more on Wikipedia...

• Punycode Wikipedia page
• Punycode first developed in University of California, Berkeley
• Read more about Punycode on the web: 1.