Python - IP Address

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IP Address (Internet Protocol) is a fundamental networking concept that provides address assignation capability in a network. The python module ipaddress is used extensively to validate and categorize IP address to IPV4 and IPV6 type. It can also be used to do comparison of the IP address values as well as IP address arithmetic for manipulating the ip addresses.

Validate the IPV4 Address

The ip_address function validates the IPV4 address. If the range of values is beyond 0 to 255, then it throws an error.

print (ipaddress.ip_address(u'192.168.0.255'))
print (ipaddress.ip_address(u'192.168.0.256'))

When we run the above program, we get the following output −

192.168.0.255
ValueError: u'192.168.0.256' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address

Validate the IPV6 Address

The ip_address function validates the IPV6 address. If the range of values is beyond 0 to ffff, then it throws an error.

print (ipaddress.ip_address(u'FFFF:9999:2:FDE:257:0:2FAE:112D'))

#invalid IPV6 address
print (ipaddress.ip_address(u'FFFF:10000:2:FDE:257:0:2FAE:112D'))

When we run the above program, we get the following output −

ffff:9999:2:fde:257:0:2fae:112d
ValueError: u'FFFF:10000:2:FDE:257:0:2FAE:112D' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address

Check the type of IP Address

We can supply the IP address of various formats and the module will be able to recognize the valid formats. It will also indicate which category of IP address it is.

print type(ipaddress.ip_address(u'192.168.0.255'))

print type(ipaddress.ip_address(u'2001:db8::'))

print ipaddress.ip_address(u'192.168.0.255').reverse_pointer

print ipaddress.ip_network(u'192.168.0.0/28')

When we run the above program, we get the following output −

255.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa
192.168.0.0/28

Comparison of IP Addresses

We can make a logical comparison of the IP addresses finding out if they are equal or not. We can also compare if one IP address is greater than the other in its value.

print (ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.2') > ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.1'))
print (ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.2') == ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.1'))
print (ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.2') != ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.1'))

When we run the above program, we get the following output −

True
False
True

IP Addresses Arithmetic

We can also apply arithmetic operations to manipulate IP addresses. We can add or subtract integers to an IP address. If after addition the value of the last octet goes beyond 255 then the previous octet gets incremented to accommodate the value. If the extra value can not be absorbed by any of the previous octet then a value error is raised.

print (ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.2')+1)

print (ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.0.253')-3)

# Increases the previous octet by value 1.
print (ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'192.168.10.253')+3)

# Throws Value error
print (ipaddress.IPv4Address(u'255.255.255.255')+1)

When we run the above program, we get the following output −

192.168.0.3
192.168.0.250
192.168.11.0
AddressValueError: 4294967296 (>= 2**32) is not permitted as an IPv4 address