Packing and unpacking IP addresses into 32-bit integers

[Ben Gertzfield]

I noticed that the 'socket' module in Python has slightly different
behavior for gethostbyname() than I'm used to.

In Python, gethostbyname() returns a string, not a packed IP address
(a 32-bit integer) of the IP address, as C and Perl do.  However, I
need to talk with C over the network, and the 'struct' module doesn't
deal with packing or unpacking IP addresses.

Do I have to use a regular expression to split up the dotted quads
that gethostbyname() returns into the component bytes and then use
binary shifts and or'ing to get them into a standard 32-bit integer
format?  Or is there a better way that I'm totally missing?

Ben

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