Packing and unpacking IP addresses into 32-bit integers

[Ben Gertzfield]

Thanks. Here's what I came up with finally. I decided to avoid use
of apply() for clarity, as these are dense enough as it is. :)

import string, struct

def inet_aton(packme):
    """Given a IP address as a string of the form 123.45.67.89, pack
       it into the 32-bit binary representation (struct in_addr) used
       in C and other languages."""
    
    a, b, c, d = map(string.atoi, string.split(packme, '.'))
    return struct.pack('BBBB', a, b, c, d)

def inet_ntoa(packed):
    """Unpacks a 32-bit binary representation of an IP address into a
       string and return it in dotted-quad (123.45.67.89) format."""
       
    quads = map(str, struct.unpack('BBBB', packed))
    return string.join(quads, '.')

I'm not sure if it's overly-compact, or if I ought to do things with
binary arithmetic for clarity. Anyway, it seems to work. Thanks for
the tip!

Ben

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