ASCII and Unicode are character sets for computers. Imagine ASCII like a small alphabet, only for English letters, numbers, and some symbols.

Unicode URLs such as the ones on this site cause the script to break since Ruby's URI library expects only ASCII-encoded URIs. Solution: Encode all URLs for processing, and then decode before writing ...

One answer is Punycode, which is a way to represent Unicode characters in ASCII. However, while you could technically encode the raw bits of Unicode into characters, like Base64 , there’s a snag.

Unicode has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on the World Wide Web, Mark Davis, Google's senior international software architect, said in a blog post.

Chrome Extension Detects URL Homograph (Unicode) Attacks. By ... Some browsers have fought back by replacing the Unicode characters with Punycode, an ASCII-based representation of Unicode characters.

Punycode is specifically equipped to handle this, as it's a standard for representing Unicode text using ASCII characters. For example, the Chinese character “ 短 “ is represented in Punycode ...