On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 11:45:46AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
Except that this computer's IPv4 is not 3232235539, and I never want to enter it that way. I enter it as 192.168.0.19 - as four separate integers.
That's partly convention (and a useful convention: it is less error- prone than 3232235539) and partly that because you're a sys admin who can read the individual subfields of an IP address. I'm not suggesting you ought to change your habit. But to civilians, 192.168.0.19 is as opaque as 3232235539 or 0xC0A80013 would be. We allow creating IP address objects from a single int, we don't require four separate int arguments (one for each subfield), and unless I've missed something, IP addresses are not treated as a collection of four separate integers (or more for v6). I can't even find a method to split an address into four ints. (Nor am I sure that there is good reason to want to do so.) So calling a single address "four separate integers" is not really accurate. [...]
IP addresses can be losslessly converted to and from strings, too, and that's a lot more useful. But they still don't have string methods, because they're not strings.
I agree they're not strings, I never suggested they were. Python only allows IP addresses to be entered as strings because we don't have a "dotted-quad" syntax for 32-bit integers. (Nor am I suggesting we should.) It is meaningless to perform string operations on IP addresses. What would it mean to call addr.replace('.', 'Z') or addr.split('2')? But doing *at least some* int operations on addresses isn't meaningless: py> a = ipaddress.ip_address('192.168.0.19') py> a + 1 IPv4Address('192.168.0.20') -- Steve