I’m thinking of writing a package called “CàiSemiprimes” or “蔡Semiprimes” (Cài is a mathematician). Is it legal for a package name to have a non-ASCII character? To start with a character that does not have an upper/lowercase distinction?

I would heavily discourage it, if only because users will struggle to type it (and hence install it / import it / search for it)

[image] phma: Is it legal for a package name to have a non-ASCII character? Not for packages in the General registry, at least. All package names must be ASCII alphanumeric and start with a capital letter.

[image] gdalle: I would heavily discourage it, if only because users will struggle to type it à is in several keyboard layouts, and we program with characters such as ℯ, ∈, and ⊻, which aren’t on any keyboard layout that I know of, so we have to type \euler, \in, or \xor in the REPL, hit tab,…

A fuller list here: Automatic merging guidelines · RegistryCI.jl Not sure if personal registries would need to have any rules besides package names being valid Julia identifiers.

Automatic merging is one thing but then there is also : Are there any requirements for package names in the General registry? There are no hard requirements, but it is highly recommended to follow the package naming guidelines . Nevertheless, ASCII characters are definitely more user-friendly. …

[image] barucden: There are no hard requirements, but it is highly recommended to follow the package naming guidelines . Which, as I pointed out above, don’t mention ASCII.

There are no packages in General with non-ASCII names and I don’t think we would want to start now. Feel free to PR the ASCII requirement to Pkg’s docs.

Add ASCII requirement for package naming master ← gdalle:ascii opened 10:32AM - 08 Oct 25 UTC (UTC) [image] gdalle …

[image] phma: characters such as ℯ, ∈, and ⊻, which aren’t on any keyboard layout Total side note, and shameless self-promotion, but The "U.S. International - Scientific" Keyboard Layout - Michael Goerz Still: do not require Unicode in the public API of your package; you can use something li…

[image] phma: [image] barucden: There are no hard requirements, but it is highly recommended to follow the package naming guidelines . Which, as I pointed out above, don’t mention ASCII. Update package name guidelines (ASCII required) …

Can package names contain non-ASCII characters?

General Usage

phma October 8, 2025, 8:38am 7

Which, as I pointed out above, don’t mention ASCII.

Topic		Replies	Views
Can I still register packages with only three characters? General Usage package	3	365	June 3, 2022
The present and the future of package registration Package Management	80	2567	June 11, 2023
Renaming an existing package with changed capitalization General Usage package-manager , registry	2	170	April 1, 2026
Package naming guidelines Community	57	5387	January 11, 2026
Registering a new package and naming convention New to Julia package , registry	2	886	May 9, 2020

Can package names contain non-ASCII characters?

Related topics