Public Suffix List Engine • pslr

A focused, spec-complete implementation of the Public Suffix List (PSL) for R. pslr bundles a reproducible, pinned PSL snapshot and implements the official prevailing-rule algorithm to answer public-suffix (eTLD) and registrable-domain (eTLD+1) queries.

Distinguishes the ICANN and PRIVATE rule sections.
Accepts Unicode, ASCII, and A-label hostnames via punycoder canonicalization; returns ASCII or Unicode output.
Works fully offline from the bundled snapshot; an explicit, validated psl_refresh() is the only network path.
Matcher compiled with cpp11; no external system library required.

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("pslr")

Or the development version from r-universe:

install.packages(
  "pslr",
  repos = c("https://bart-turczynski.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org")
)

pslr depends on punycoder, which is installed automatically from CRAN.

Usage

library(pslr)

public_suffix("www.example.co.uk")
#> [1] "co.uk"
registrable_domain("www.example.co.uk")
#> [1] "example.co.uk"

# ICANN vs PRIVATE sections
public_suffix("user.github.io")
#> [1] "github.io"
public_suffix("user.github.io", section = "icann")
#> [1] "io"

# Explicit membership vs the implicit default rule
is_public_suffix("madeuptld")                 # implicit "*"
#> [1] TRUE
is_public_suffix("madeuptld", unknown = "na") # explicit only
#> [1] NA

# Split a host, or inspect the prevailing rule
suffix_extract("blog.user.github.io")
#>                 input                host subdomain domain    suffix
#> 1 blog.user.github.io blog.user.github.io      blog   user github.io
#>   registrable_domain
#> 1     user.github.io
public_suffix_rule("a.b.kobe.jp")
#>         input  host_ascii      rule     kind rule_section public_suffix_ascii
#> 1 a.b.kobe.jp a.b.kobe.jp *.kobe.jp wildcard        icann           b.kobe.jp

See vignette("introduction", package = "pslr") for the full tour: section choice, the unknown-suffix policy, IDN output, terminal dots, refresh and activation, freshness and scheduling, reproducibility, and security notes.

Freshness

psl_status() reports, entirely offline, the strongest claim the locally stored evidence supports about the active snapshot — whether it was confirmed current against its source, whether a check is merely due, or whether a check actually observed a newer list. Elapsed time alone is never reported as an update: “a check is due” and “upstream changed” are different statements, and pslr only makes the second one after a real check.

psl_status()
#> <psl_status: never_checked>
#>   Never checked against its source.
#>   No successful check has confirmed these bytes against the source. Run
#>   psl_refresh() to check.
#>   snapshot:     active (bundled)
#>   checksum:     sha256:00dda6fa8406...
#>   source:       https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
#>   content date: 2026-09-05 14:17 UTC
#>   retrieved:    2026-10-05 08:46 UTC

psl_refresh() is the only network path. It sends a conditional request when it can, honors the list’s no-more-than-daily download guidance, and returns one of four outcomes: skipped_recently (no request), not_modified (304, no body), downloaded_unchanged, or updated. Opt in to a weekly offline reminder with psl_reminder(enable = TRUE); for automation, run pslr::psl_refresh() from cron or any scheduler you already have — pslr installs none and runs no background task.

Reproducibility

A result depends on both which list answered and how hosts were normalized. psl_version() reports the active-list provenance plus the runtime normalization identifiers; record it alongside reproducibility-sensitive output.

How pslr compares to other PSL libraries

The Public Suffix List website catalogs implementations in a dozen languages but none in R. pslr fills that gap as a reproducibility- and correctness-first engine: it records which list answered and how hosts were normalized, runs the official upstream test vectors on every check, works offline by default, and can diff two snapshots. vignette("comparison", package = "pslr") sets it against ten established libraries, from libpsl to tldts, and lists its trade-offs.

Acknowledgments

These packages build on data, libraries, and prior work from many others. See ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md for the full list of thanks.

pslr is part of a small ecosystem of R packages by the same author:

punycoder — the Punycode and IDNA codec that pslr uses for host canonicalization before PSL matching. Use it directly for raw Unicode ↔︎ ACE round-trips.
rurl — full URL parsing, normalization, cleaning, and joining toolkit. Uses pslr as its PSL engine; reach for it when you need more than domain extraction.

Citation

If you use pslr in your work, please cite it. Run citation("pslr") for the current citation, or see CITATION.cff.

Each release is archived on Zenodo. Cite the concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20973660 to refer to the software in general (it always resolves to the latest version), or the version-specific DOI shown on the Zenodo record for a particular release.

License

Package code is MIT licensed. The bundled Public Suffix List data (inst/extdata/) is distributed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0; see inst/NOTICE and inst/extdata/PSL-LICENSE.

pslr