Emoji is incorrectly encoded in punycode

[xPaw]

new URI("https://🤦‍♂️.xpaw.me").normalize().hostname()
> "xn--1ug66vku9rd58h.xpaw.me"

Unicode inspector: https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%F0%9F%A4%A6%E2%80%8D%E2%99%82%EF%B8%8F

However Chrome and https://www.punycoder.com/ encode it as https://xn--g5hz781o.xpaw.me/

What's happening here?

[xPaw]

Chrome and Edge drop ZERO WIDTH JOINER and VARIATION SELECTOR-16 from the punycode which ends up as xn--g5hz781o.

Firefox only drops ZWJ which ends up xn--1ug66v4685b.

Looking at this: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5894#section-7.2.2 dropping ZWJ is correct, however there's no word about variation selectors.

[rodneyrehm]

Unfortunately I have no idea how emojis in domains should behave.

We could try updating punycode to 1.4.1, currently we're using 1.4.0. unfortunately 2.0.0 seems to have dropped legacy browser support.

[xPaw]

It basically seems that IDNA rules should be followed before the domain is turned into punycode - https://unicode.org/reports/tr46/

I have a test page on https://xn--g5hz781o.xpaw.me/ which I did to test various browsers.

punycode.js doesn't seem to implement it sadly:

• https://github.com/mathiasbynens/todo/issues/9
• https://github.com/bestiejs/punycode.js/issues/12

There is https://github.com/jcranmer/idna-uts46 which could probably solve the problem here, but that library is crazy big.

[rodneyrehm]

maybe @mathiasbynens has thoughts on this?

[n4ru]

Chrome and Edge drop ZERO WIDTH JOINER and VARIATION SELECTOR-16 from the punycode which ends up as xn--g5hz781o.

Firefox only drops ZWJ which ends up xn--1ug66v4685b.

Looking at this: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5894#section-7.2.2 dropping ZWJ is correct, however there's no word about variation selectors.

Was there a conclusion regarding whether or not variation selectors should be dropped?

[jarthod]

For the record, the latest idnaMappingTable (Unicode v15) seems to say the variation selectors should be ignored/dropped:

FE00..FE0F    ; ignored                                # 3.2  VARIATION SELECTOR-1..VARIATION SELECTOR-16