Question

In the following ip address validation i want to see if it a valid ip address or not how can i do this using the below re

>>> ip="241.1.1.112343434" 
>>> aa=re.match(r"\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}[^0-9]",ip)
>>> aa.group()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'

Answer 1

Use anchors instead:

aa=re.match(r"^\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}$",ip)

These make sure that the start and end of the string are matched at the start and end of the regex. (well, technically, you don’t need the starting ^ anchor because it’s implicit in the .match() method).

Then, check if the regex did in fact match before trying to access its results:

if aa:
    ip = aa.group()

Of course, this is not a good approach for validating IP addresses (check out gnibbler’s answer for a proper method). However, regexes can be useful for detecting IP addresses in a larger string:

ip_candidates = re.findall(r"\b\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\b", ip)

Here, the \b word boundary anchors make sure that the digits don’t exceed 3 for each segment.