Question

I have a script that does a bunch of calculations on IPV4 and IPV6 address’s in their hex form

for example “70.02.03.04” would be

$ipv4=”\x46\x02\x03\x04″

This binary handle is hardcoded in my script. But now I want to generate this on the fly

I’m using “sprintf(“x%02x”, $value) for hex values, but how would I generate the binary handle as above?

Answer 1

You don’t want hex (a string representation of a number).

my $hex = '46020304';

You want the number as a four byte machine integer.

my $uint32 = "\x46\x02\x03\x04";

You can achieve this using

my $packed = pack('C4', split /\./, '70.02.03.04');

and with

use Socket qw( inet_aton );
my $packed = inet_aton('70.02.03.04');