Neil Schemenauer
Marcus Mendenhall wrote:
Even though cpu time is cheap, we should save it for useful work.
Saving a few cycles while having the complicate the interface is not the Python way. +1 on restoring the old sscanf code (or something similar to it).
For what it's worth, whenever I had network code that I wanted to accept names or addresses, I always distinguished them through an attempt using the platform inet_addr() system call. If that returns an error (-1), then I go ahead and process it as a name, otherwise I use the address it returns. inet_addr() will itself take care of validating that the address is legal (e.g., no octet over 255 and only up to 4 octets), padding values as necessary (e.g., x.y.z is processed as if z was a 16-bit value, x.z as if z was a 24-bit value, x as a 32-bit value), and permits decimal, octal or hexadecimal forms of the individual octets. I believe this behavior is portable and well defined. If you wanted the same code to work for IPv4 and IPv6, you'd probably want to use inet_pton() instead since inet_addr() only does IPv4, although that would lose the hex/octal options. You'd probably have to conditionalize that anyway since it might not be available on IPv4 only configurations, so I could see using inet_addr() for IPv4 and inet_pton() for IPv6.
ObTrivia: IP addresses can be written as a single number (at least for many IP implementations). Try "ping 2130706433".
That's part of the inet_addr() definition. When a single value is given as the string, it is assumed to be the complete 32-bit address value, and is stored directly without any byte rearrangement. So, 2130706433 is (127*2^24) + 1, or "127.0.0.1" - but then obviously you knew that :-) -- David