Question

I read that the best way to store IP addresses in a database is to make an Unsigned Int(10) field. How do I convert the IP addresses using PHP? I’ve tried using

$this->ip = long2ip($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

But this doesn’t seem to work. I found the way to convert it back to an IP address using

$this->ip = sprintf("%u", ip2long($result['ip']));

How do I convert the IP Address initially? Should I be using PHP for this? Or would it be better to integrate into the MySQL query?

Answer 1

long2ip converts an integer into the IP format and ip2long does the inverse.

So use ip2long to convert $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] into an integer for storing it in the database and use long2ip after reading the integer from the database:

$long = ip2long($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
$ip   = long2ip($long);