Currently, PHP doesn’t have any native support of IDN: domains with non-ASCII characters such as http://www.académie-française.fr. If you try to connect to such site you’ll get nothing but an error: file_get_contents(‘http://académie-française.fr’); // PHP Warning: file_get_contents(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: nodename nor servname provided, or not known in php shell code on line 1 RFC 3490 specifies that applications must convert IDN…