**The version of the punycode module bundled in Node.js is being deprecated. **In a future major version of Node.js this module will be removed. Users currently depending on the punycode module should switch to using the userland-provided Punycode.js module instead. For punycode-based URL encoding, see url.domainToASCII or, more generally, the WHATWG URL API.

The punycode module is a bundled version of the Punycode.js module. It can be accessed using:

import punycode from 'node:punycode';

Punycode is a character encoding scheme defined by RFC 3492 that is primarily intended for use in Internationalized Domain Names. Because host names in URLs are limited to ASCII characters only, Domain Names that contain non-ASCII characters must be converted into ASCII using the Punycode scheme. For instance, the Japanese character that translates into the English word, 'example' is '例'. The Internationalized Domain Name, '例.com' (equivalent to 'example.com') is represented by Punycode as the ASCII string 'xn--fsq.com'.

The punycode module provides a simple implementation of the Punycode standard.

The punycode module is a third-party dependency used by Node.js and made available to developers as a convenience. Fixes or other modifications to the module must be directed to the Punycode.js project.