Mark Andrews
INTERNET DRAFT                                                     CSIRO
Expires: September 1996                                       March 1996

                    ASCII Encoding for Domain Names

                     draft-andrews-dns-ascii-00.txt

. Status of This Memo

   This document is an Internet Draft.  Internet Drafts are working
   documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its Areas,
   and its Working Groups.  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet Drafts.

   Internet Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
   months.  Internet Drafts may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by
   other documents at any time.  It is not appropriate to use Internet
   Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as a "working
   draft" or "work in progress."

   Please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the internet-
   drafts Shadow Directories to learn the current status of any Internet
   Draft.

. Abstract

   At the protocol level, DNS domain names and records may contain
   arbitrary binary data.  There is not however a standard way of
   representing these domains as ASCII strings. This RFC describes how
   to encode domain names as a single ASCII string containing no white
   space.

. Encoding

   Octets within the follow ranges are encoded as backslash followed by
   three octal digits, 0x00 - 0x08, 0x0b - 0x0c, 0x0e - 0x1f, 0x7f -
   0xff.

           e.g.
                   0x00, \000
                   0x1f, \177
                   0xff, \377

   Period (".") when NOT used as a domain separator is encoded as the
   sequence backslash period, e.g. "\.". Un-escaped periods indicate
   label separators.




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Internet Draft       draft-andrews-dns-ascii-00.txt        February 1996


   Backslash ("\") is encoded as two consecutive backslashes, e.g. "\\".

   The follow are special encoding for particular characters.

           0x09, "\t", Horizontal Tab
           0x0a, "\n", Newline
           0x0d, "\r", Carriage Return
           0x20, "\s", Space

   All other characters represent their literal ASCII encoding eighth
   bit not set.

. Security

   This draft introduces no known security problems. It may however
   remove some latent security problems in applications where the
   encoding is NOT reversible leading to unexpected changes in domain
   names.

. Author's Address

   Mark Andrews
   CSIRO
   Division of Mathematics and Statistics
   Locked Bag 17
   North Ryde NSW 2113
   AUSTRALIA

   Mark.Andrews@dms.csiro.au [MA88]






















Andrews                                                         [Page 2]