Converting an IPv4 address to different formats

When you would like to deal with low-level network functions, sometimes, the usual string notation of IP addresses are not very useful. They need to be converted to the packed 32-bit binary formats.

How to do it...

The Python socket library has utilities to deal with the various IP address formats. Here, we will use two of them: inet_aton() and inet_ntoa().

Let us create the convert_ip4_address() function, where inet_aton() and inet_ntoa() will be used for the IP address conversion. We will use two sample IP addresses, 127.0.0.1 and 192.168.0.1.

Listing 1.3 shows ip4_address_conversion as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and 
  Python 3.5.2.
# It may run on any other version with/without 
  modifications.
    
    
    import socket
    from binascii import hexlify
    
    
    def convert_ip4_address():
        for ip_addr in ['127.0.0.1', '192.168.0.1']:
            packed_ip_addr = socket.
       ...