urlread / urlwrite with umlaut in the url - is there a way to get this to work?

Dear all,

I am trying to read a url that contains german umlauts. This does, apparently, not work with urlread/urlwrite. An example:

urlread('http://www.möbel.de')

produces an error, whereas:

urlread('http://www.moebel.de')

works. Both urls link to the same webpage in this example, btw.

Is there a way to get this to work? In my case, I can not just replace the umlaut (ä -> ae, ö -> oe, ü -> ue), since then the url can not be resolved.

Thanks!

Bjoern

Answer 1

[Friedrich]

HI,

you need to punnycode the name. Try

urlread(char(java.net.IDN.toASCII('http://www.möbel.de')))

[Jan]

Wow. Puny-Code is really unexpected for me:

 http://www.xn--mbel-5qa.de

Does this mean, that I cannot reserve this neat address, because someone else wanted to include an ö in his web-address? ;-)

Thanks, Friedrich, for this useful information. +1