# Strange URL looking? **URL:** \ **Category:** Uncategorized\ **Created:** [March 10, 2015, 10:41am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/strange-url-looking/572311 "2015-03-10T10:41:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![gurkweb](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex011/user_avatar/forum.kirupa.com/gurkweb/32/7206_2.png) [@gurkweb](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/gurkweb)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2015, 10:41am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/strange-url-looking/572311/1 "2015-03-10T10:41:06Z")
Hey guys! So I am browsing around searching for military in Sweden. I really want to take a 3 months course when you learn the basics. Military service is unfortunately not mandatory in Sweden anymore… Anways, so I come to this site: [http://militärtjänst.se/](http://xn--militrtjnst-p8ad.se/) and what I wonder is why the URL looks like that? Because when I copy it it looks like this: militärtjänst.se - It must be something with the Swedish åäö right? But if I am not remembering wrong I have been able to use åäö in urls before. Thanks in advance! ---
**Author:** ![senocular](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex011/user_avatar/forum.kirupa.com/senocular/32/7217_2.png) [@senocular](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/senocular)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2015, 11:04am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/strange-url-looking/572311/2 "2015-03-10T11:04:43Z")
I wrote something about how little I knew about this and then when looking up the name I forgot pretty much stumbled on the answer: > **[Internationalized domain name](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name)** > > An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Tamil, Hebrew or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics or ligatures, such as French. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multi-byte Unicode. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System as ASCII strings using... The section Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications pretty much explains it