What is the Punycode in Node.js ?

Punycode is a special encoding syntax that is specifically used to convert Unicode characters (UTF-8) to ASCII, which is nothing but the restricted string character set. 

Why this type of specific conversion needed ? The hostnames will understand only ASCII characters. Punycode is used by the International Domain Names(IDN) in order to encode/decode the URL which has been typed in the browser. 
For example: If you search mañana.com in the browser, your browser which has an inbuilt IDNA service convert that to xn--maana-pta.com with the help of Punycode converter embedded in the browser. 

Now let’s see, how-to-use Punycode with the help of Node.js. 

Punycode in Node.js: Punycode is bundled with node.js v0.6.2 and the later versions. If you want to use Punycode, you need to install Punycode module using npm installation. 

npm installation:

 npm install punycode --save 

Include punycode module:

const punycode = require('punycode');

punycode.decode(string): It is used to convert Punycode strings of ASCII to Unicode symbols. 

Example:

javascript

// Include punycode module
const punycode = require('punycode');

// Decode Punycode strings of ASCII
// to Unicode symbols
console.log(punycode.decode('manama-pta'));
console.log(punycode.decode('--dqo34k'));

Output:

punycode.encode(string): It is used to convert Unicode strings to Punycode strings of ASCII symbols. 

Example:

JavaScript

// Include punycode module
const punycode = require('punycode');

// Encode Unicode symbols to
// Punycode ASCII string
console.log(punycode.encode('máanama'));
console.log(punycode.encode('?-?'));

Output:

manama-pta
--dqo34k

punycode.toUnicode(input): It is used to convert Punycode strings that represent a domain name or an email address to Unicode symbols. It doesn’t matter you call it on an already converted Unicode. 

Example:

javascript

// Include punycode module
const punycode = require('punycode');

console.log(punycode.toUnicode('xn--maana-pta.com'));
console.log(punycode.toUnicode('xn----dqo34k.com'));

Output:

punycode.toASCII(input): It is used to convert lowercased Unicode strings that represent a domain name or an email address to Punycode symbols. It doesn’t matter you call it with a domain that’s already in ASCII. 

Example:

javascript

// Include punycode module
const punycode = require('punycode');

console.log(punycode.toASCII('mañana.com'));
console.log(punycode.toASCII('?-?.com'));

Output:

xn--maana-pta.com
xn----dqo34k.com

punycode.ucs2.decode(string): Creates an array of numeric code point values for each Unicode code symbols in the string.Behind the scenes in the browser which was built on Javascript internally, the UCS-2 function in it, will convert a pair of surrogate halves into a single coded point. 

Example:

javascript

// Include punycode module
const punycode = require('punycode');

// Decoding strings
console.log(punycode.ucs2.decode('abc'));
console.log(punycode.ucs2.decode('\uD834\uDF06'));

Output:

[ 97, 98, 99 ]
[ 119558 ]

UCS-2: UCS-2 is a 2-byte Universal Character Set that produces a fixed-length format by using 16-bit code unit. The code point ranges from 0 to 0xFFFF. 

Surrogate pairs: Characters that are outside BMP, e.g. U+1D306 TETRAGRAM FOR CENTRE:, can only be encoded by using two 16-bit code units. This is known as “surrogate pairs”. The Surrogate pairs only represent a single character alone. 

punycode.ucs2.encode(codePoints): It is used to create a string based on the array of numeric code point values. 

Example:

javascript

// Include punycode module
const punycode = require('punycode');

console.log(punycode.ucs2.encode([0x61, 0x62, 0x63]));
console.log(punycode.ucs2.encode([0x1D306]));

Output:

abc
????

You can see the Punycode Converter to see the live result.