由于
ipaddress
is a module for inspecting and manipulating IP addresses, the first thing you’ll want to do is create some objects. You can use
ipaddress
to create objects from strings and integers.
For readers that aren’t particularly familiar with IP addressing, it’s important to know that the Internet Protocol (IP) is currently in the process of moving from version 4 of the protocol to version 6. This transition is occurring largely because version 4 of the protocol doesn’t provide enough addresses to handle the needs of the whole world, especially given the increasing number of devices with direct connections to the internet.
Explaining the details of the differences between the two versions of the protocol is beyond the scope of this introduction, but readers need to at least be aware that these two versions exist, and it will sometimes be necessary to force the use of one version or the other.
Addresses, often referred to as “host addresses” are the most basic unit when working with IP addressing. The simplest way to create addresses is to use the
ipaddress.ip_address()
factory function, which automatically determines whether to create an IPv4 or IPv6 address based on the passed in value:
To force the use of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, the relevant classes can be invoked directly. This is particularly useful to force creation of IPv6 addresses for small integers:
Host addresses are usually grouped together into IP networks, so
ipaddress
provides a way to create, inspect and manipulate network definitions. IP network objects are constructed from strings that define the range of host addresses that are part of that network. The simplest form for that information is a “network address/network prefix” pair, where the prefix defines the number of leading bits that are compared to determine whether or not an address is part of the network and the network address defines the expected value of those bits.
As for addresses, a factory function is provided that determines the correct IP version automatically:
Network objects cannot have any host bits set. The practical effect of this is that
192.0.2.1/24
does not describe a network. Such definitions are referred to as interface objects since the ip-on-a-network notation is commonly used to describe network interfaces of a computer on a given network and are described further in the next section.
By default, attempting to create a network object with host bits set will result in
ValueError
being raised. To request that the additional bits instead be coerced to zero, the flag
strict=False
can be passed to the constructor:
While the string form offers significantly more flexibility, networks can also be defined with integers, just like host addresses. In this case, the network is considered to contain only the single address identified by the integer, so the network prefix includes the entire network address:
As with addresses, creation of a particular kind of network can be forced by calling the class constructor directly instead of using the factory function.
As mentioned just above, if you need to describe an address on a particular network, neither the address nor the network classes are sufficient. Notation like
192.0.2.1/24
is commonly used by network engineers and the people who write tools for firewalls and routers as shorthand for “the host
192.0.2.1
on the network
192.0.2.0/24
”, Accordingly,
ipaddress
provides a set of hybrid classes that associate an address with a particular network. The interface for creation is identical to that for defining network objects, except that the address portion isn’t constrained to being a network address.
You’ve gone to the trouble of creating an IPv(4|6)(Address|Network|Interface) object, so you probably want to get information about it.
ipaddress
tries to make doing this easy and intuitive.
While IPv4 doesn’t support explosion or compression, the associated objects still provide the relevant properties so that version neutral code can easily ensure the most concise or most verbose form is used for IPv6 addresses while still correctly handling IPv4 addresses.
Other modules that use IP addresses (such as
socket
) usually won’t accept objects from this module directly. Instead, they must be coerced to an integer or string that the other module will accept:
When creating address/network/interface objects using the version-agnostic factory functions, any errors will be reported as
ValueError
with a generic error message that simply says the passed in value was not recognized as an object of that type. The lack of a specific error is because it’s necessary to know whether the value is
supposed
to be IPv4 or IPv6 in order to provide more detail on why it has been rejected.
To support use cases where it is useful to have access to this additional detail, the individual class constructors actually raise the
ValueError
子类
ipaddress.AddressValueError
and
ipaddress.NetmaskValueError
to indicate exactly which part of the definition failed to parse correctly.
The error messages are significantly more detailed when using the class constructors directly. For example:
>>> ipaddress.ip_address("192.168.0.256")Traceback (most recent call last):...ValueError: '192.168.0.256' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address>>> ipaddress.IPv4Address("192.168.0.256")Traceback (most recent call last):...ipaddress.AddressValueError: Octet 256 (> 255) not permitted in '192.168.0.256'>>> ipaddress.ip_network("192.168.0.1/64")Traceback (most recent call last):...ValueError: '192.168.0.1/64' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 network>>> ipaddress.IPv4Network("192.168.0.1/64")Traceback (most recent call last):...ipaddress.NetmaskValueError: '64' is not a valid netmask
However, both of the module specific exceptions have
ValueError
as their parent class, so if you’re not concerned with the particular type of error, you can still write code like the following:
try:network=ipaddress.IPv4Network(address)exceptValueError:print('address/netmask is invalid for IPv4:',address)
