Question

My application needs to send and read IPv6 addresses over the wire. It’s only going to be read by my application, but I’d still like to follow convention. Is there a library function for doing this?

Answer 1

The socket module has a function for this, called inet_pton. However, it’s not available on all platforms. (It is not available on the Windows machine I’m writing this on.)

I recommend that you use a nonstandard library called ipaddr. It has two somewhat non-obvious functions that will do precisely what you need:

from ipaddr import ipaddr
raw = '\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'
ip = ipaddr.IPv6Address(ipaddr.Bytes(raw))

print "IP is: " + str(ip)

original = bytes(ip.packed)

print "Original raw bytes: " + repr(original)