libiri is a simple toolkit for parsing Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs).

For many intents and purposes, you can think of libiri as a “URL parser which supports Unicode”.

Specifically:

URLs are a subset of URIs URIs are restricted to a portion of the ASCII character set IRIs are a superset of URIs that are not restricted to ASCII characters If something is a valid URL or URI, it's also a valid IRI.