IP address to binary conversion

[Alan Bawden]

al.alexiev at gmail.com writes:

> Just for the records and to have a fully working bidirectional solution:
> 
> >>> ip
> '10.44.32.0'
> >>> struct.unpack('L', socket.inet_aton(ip))[0]
> 2108426
> >>> socket.inet_ntoa(struct.pack('<L', 2108426))
> '10.44.32.0'
> >>>
> 
> Good luck ;-)

This will not work as expected on a big-endian machine, because 'L' means
_native_ byte order, but '<L' means little-endian byte order.  Better to
use exactly the same format argument for both packing and unpacking.  I
would use '!L' for both, since inet_ntoa and inet_aton are defined to work
with IPv4 addresses in _network_ byte order.

-- 
Alan Bawden