Top level domains and punycode with C#

Punycode is used to encode Unicode characters into ASCII for IDN (Internationalized domain name).

On the RFC 3492 you'll find:

"Punycode is a simple and efficient transfer encoding syntax designed for use with Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). It uniquely and reversibly transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string."

Now if you are looking for validating TLD (Top level domains), you must have that information in mind. The ICANN list of TLD also contains the IDN ccTLD that started to be included in 2010.

Some Punycode encoded examples from that list:

XN--0ZWM56D
XN--11B5BS3A9AJ6G
XN--3E0B707E
XN--45BRJ9C
XN--80AKHBYKNJ4F
XN--80AO21A
XN--90A3AC
XN--9T4B11YI5A
XN--CLCHC0EA0B2G2A9GCD
XN--DEBA0AD
XN--FIQS8S
XN--FIQZ9S

The prefix is XN-- makes it easier to identify the Punycode enconded strings.

Luckily the since version 2.0, the .Net Framework offers a class to deal with IDN (Punycode and the Nameprep it has to do prior to encoding):

System.Globalization.IdnMapping.

My goal was to receive a TLD (string) and validate it against the ICANN list of TLD. My first snippet throw an exception on line 4:

var tld = ".ਭਾਰਤ";
if (Regex.IsMatch(tld, @"[^\u0000-\u007F]"))
{
    tld = _IdnMapping.GetAscii(tld);
}

Exception message was: IDN labels must be between 1 and 63 characters long.

My speed reading techniques are quite bad.. In fact I don't have any. Sometimes I just focus on what I believe to be the most important part of the message (in this case "1 and 63 chars long" which didn't make sense) and I ended up missing something important (IDN labels).

I googled the exception, finding only these very useful (?!?) Exception translation websites and nothing more.
Only to better read the message and realize that the catch was that IdnMapping works with domain name labels:

"A constituent part of a domain name. The labels of domain names are connected by dots. For example, "www.iana.org" contains three labels — "www", "iana" and "org". For internationalized domain names, the labels may be referred to as A-labels and U-labels."

Therefore, my input was simply broken considering it started with a dot. If you are looking to validate the complete list of TLD, including ccTLD, or even the complete domain with multiple labels supporting IDN, the IdnMapping class is a go. However, make sure your code does not have leading or trailing dots by having it Trim('.') or something.

Regarding the IDNA versions, on the .Net framework prior to version 4.5 works with version 2003. Now if you are running .Net Framework 4.5 on Windows 8, the IDNA 2008 will be used.