Browser / DNS process for invalid characters in a domain?

Question

I'm wondering how the browser, and/or DNS, handles a user entering an invalid character in a domain name.

Let's say that I own meat&potatoes, a well-known chain of fine dining restaurants. All of our marketing refers to us as meat&potatoes (meat + ampersand + potatoes, no spaces), and it's likely that fairly often, people are typing www.meat&potatoes.com into their browser.

How does the browser, and/or their ISP's DNS, handle this request? Are there any ways I can get the user to the correct domain without requiring them to make additional clicks / keystrokes?

Answer 1

Host names are limited (RFC1034 section 3.5) to letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and hyphen (-). Additionally, international characters are allowed by recent browsers using puny-encoding (RFC3492) - which basically applies to character values above 127.

I don't know specifically how browsers handle this, but I expect that they go by these two sets of rules, and gives the end-user an error/redirect for anything else.

And therefore it never gets as far as DNS / ISPs.

Unfortunately this means that there is currently no way to make "&" in a domain name work...