unusual characters in zonefile

[Geoffrey Sisson]

Arnt Gulbrandsen <arnt at gulbrandsen.priv.no> writes:

> Uh. This is portable? RFCs generally don't cover file formats, so I 
> don't suppose it's in any RFC... may I ask who defined that and which 
> servers support it?

>From Section 5.1 of RFC 1035:

------------------------ Begin included text ------------------------

Because these files are text files several special encodings are
necessary to allow arbitrary data to be loaded.  In particular:

. . .

\DDD            where each D is a digit is the octet corresponding to
                the decimal number described by DDD.  The resulting
                octet is assumed to be text and is not checked for
                special meaning.

------------------------- End included text -------------------------

[ Credit to Olaf K. for pointing this out when I made the same
assumption. ]

Regards

Geoff