Converting domain names to idn in python

Question

I have a long list of domain names which I need to generate some reports on. The list contains some IDN domains, and although I know how to convert them in python on the com

Answer 1

you need to know in which encoding you file was saved. This would be something like 'utf-8' (which is NOT Unicode) or 'iso-8859-1' or 'cp1252' or alike.

Then you can do (assuming 'utf-8'):

infile = open(sys.argv[1])

for line in infile:
    print line,
    domain = line.strip().decode('utf-8')
    print type(domain)
    print "IDN:", domain.encode("idna")
    print

Convert encoded strings to unicode with decode. Convert unicode to string with encode. If you try to encode something which is already encoded, python tries to decode first, with the default codec 'ascii' which fails for non-ASCII-values.