punycoder

High-performance Unicode and Punycode encoding/decoding for internationalized domain names (IDNs) in R.

Overview

The punycoder package addresses critical gaps in R’s URL processing capabilities by providing reliable, fast conversion between Unicode and ASCII representations of domain names. It follows RFC 3492 standards and is designed for robust handling of internationalized domain names in web scraping, data analysis, and URL processing workflows.

Dependencies

punycoder has a small dependency footprint:

• Runtime dependencies: R (>= 3.5.0), Rcpp
• Optional system dependency: libidn2 (detected at compile time)
• Optional build helper: pkg-config (used by configure to detect libidn2)
• Development dependencies: testthat, knitr, rmarkdown

Installation

Install the released version of punycoder from CRAN with:

install.packages("punycoder")

Or install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("bart-turczynski/punycoder")

Optional native backend (libidn2)

punycoder works without extra system libraries. If libidn2 is available at build time, the package enables a native backend automatically; otherwise it uses the built-in C++ fallback backend.

To install the recommended optional dependency:

• macOS (Homebrew):
  • brew install libidn2 pkg-config
• Debian/Ubuntu:
  • sudo apt-get install libidn2-0-dev pkg-config
• Fedora/RHEL/CentOS:
  • sudo dnf install libidn2-devel pkgconf-pkg-config
• Arch Linux:
  • sudo pacman -S libidn2 pkgconf

Verify the library is visible before installing punycoder from source:

system("pkg-config --modversion libidn2")

Then install/reinstall punycoder:

remotes::install_github("bart-turczynski/punycoder")

Example

library(punycoder)

# Basic encoding
puny_encode("café.com")
#> [1] "xn--caf-dma.com"

# Check if domain is punycode
is_punycode("xn--example")
#> [1] TRUE

# Validate domains
validate_domain("test.com")
#> Punycoder Domain Validation Results
#> ==================================
#> 
#> Domain: test.com 
#> Valid:  TRUE

Key Features

• Reliable Encoding/Decoding: RFC 3492 compliant punycode conversion
• URL-Aware Processing: Handle complete URLs with international domains
• High Performance: Vectorized operations for processing large datasets
• Comprehensive Validation: Robust error handling with informative messages
• Flexible Backend: Automatically uses libidn2 when available, with a built-in fallback backend

Use Cases

Web Scraping

Process international websites with Unicode domain names:

international_urls <- c(
  "https://café.paris.fr/menu",
  "https://москва.рф/news",
  "https://北京.中国/info"
)

# Convert for HTTP requests
ascii_urls <- url_encode(international_urls)

Data Analysis

Clean and standardize URL datasets:

# Identify international domains
is_idn(c("café.com", "example.com", "москва.рф"))

# Validate domain names
validate_domain(c("valid.com", "invalid..domain"))

Current State

punycoder currently provides:

• Domain encoding/decoding: puny_encode(), puny_decode()
• URL host processing: url_encode(), url_decode(), parse_url()
• Domain validation utilities: is_punycode(), is_idn(), validate_domain()
• Vectorized operations and strict/non-strict handling for malformed input
• Build-time backend selection (libidn2 when present, built-in fallback otherwise)
• Structured URL parsing where invalid inputs are returned as missing components

Acknowledgments

• Core C++/R integration is powered by Rcpp.
• Optional native punycode backend support is provided through libidn2.
• punycoder is inspired by urltools and is designed to provide a robust fix for punycode encode/decode issues that may arise in urltools workflows.

Contributing

We welcome contributions. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the current development workflow.

License

MIT