Ampersand in domain

andyrossy · August 4, 2009, 1:47pm

Hi,

A client of mine has done a big leaflet drop and entered their domain with an ampersand as opposed to the word ‘and’.

Is there anything I can do with htaccess/dns/whatever to redirect the incorrect url’s to the correct url? I am aware ampersands cannot be used in domain names, however the client wasn’t.

Thanks
Andy

calkie_f · August 4, 2009, 2:20pm

Hi Andy,

If it’s www.something&something.com there’s not a lot technically you can do – the DNS request won’t get anywhere near to what you can control (ie, the real domain’s DNS entries).

If the & sign was in the host part (www) then you might have a fighting chance of using a * A record or something. If the & is in the path part of the URL then it should be do-able with htaccess.

andyrossy · August 4, 2009, 7:59pm

Hi, thank you. No i’m afraid it’s in the www.something&something.com part. From my knowledge I didn’t think anything could be done, but i’ve never come across this problem so thought i’d ask. Thanks for your reply.

Andy

dklynn · August 5, 2009, 12:12pm

ar,

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt:

The host is a domain name of a network host, or its IPv4 address as a
set of four decimal digit groups separated by “.”. Literal IPv6
addresses are not supported.
  hostport      = host [ ":" port ]
  host          = hostname | IPv4address
  hostname      = *( domainlabel "." ) toplabel [ "." ]
  domainlabel   = alphanum | alphanum *( alphanum | "-" ) alphanum
  toplabel      = alpha | alpha *( alphanum | "-" ) alphanum

That’s “geek-speak” for you can’t do that as “&” is an illegal character.

Regards,

DK

Manpasand · August 5, 2009, 4:39pm

I don’t think it is technically incorrect since & treated as

felgall · August 5, 2009, 7:45pm

not by domain name servers.

Invalid characters such as & in the actual domain name are going to get rejected by the first domain name server that sees them and never get close to any web hosting.

dklynn · August 5, 2009, 10:24pm

^ what felgall says!

Regards,

DK

SiberForum · August 6, 2009, 6:17am

I suppose you can use that in the site title &&& but in the domain name you must use “and”
The brigjt example is 1&1

Manpasand · August 6, 2009, 7:11am

Yes, I agree.

linkin99 · August 18, 2009, 1:14pm

Yes, it is an invalid character. Your only real hope is that people understand that it’s a mistake and try typing out the “and” instead of the “&”.