How to validate IP address in Python? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• check if a string matches an IP address pattern in python? 18 answers

What's the best way to validate that an IP entered by the user is valid? It comes in as a string.

Answer 1

Don't parse it. Just ask.

import socket

try:
    socket.inet_aton(addr)
    # legal
except socket.error:
    # Not legal

Answer 2

import socket

def is_valid_ipv4_address(address):
    try:
        socket.inet_pton(socket.AF_INET, address)
    except AttributeError:  # no inet_pton here, sorry
        try:
            socket.inet_aton(address)
        except socket.error:
            return False
        return address.count('.') == 3
    except socket.error:  # not a valid address
        return False

    return True

def is_valid_ipv6_address(address):
    try:
        socket.inet_pton(socket.AF_INET6, address)
    except socket.error:  # not a valid address
        return False
    return True

Answer 3

The IPy module (a module designed for dealing with IP addresses) will throw a ValueError exception for invalid addresses.

>>> from IPy import IP
>>> IP('127.0.0.1')
IP('127.0.0.1')
>>> IP('277.0.0.1')
Traceback (most recent call last):
 ...
ValueError: '277.0.0.1': single byte must be 0 <= byte < 256
>>> IP('foobar')
Traceback (most recent call last):
 ...
ValueError: invalid literal for long() with base 10: 'foobar'

However, like Dustin's answer, it will accept things like "4" and "192.168" since, as mentioned, these are valid representations of IP addresses.

If you're using Python 3.3 or later, it now includes the ipaddress module:

>>> import ipaddress
>>> ipaddress.ip_address('127.0.0.1')
IPv4Address('127.0.0.1')
>>> ipaddress.ip_address('277.0.0.1')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/ipaddress.py", line 54, in ip_address
    address)
ValueError: '277.0.0.1' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address
>>> ipaddress.ip_address('foobar')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/ipaddress.py", line 54, in ip_address
    address)
ValueError: 'foobar' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address

For Python 2, you can get the same functionality using ipaddress if you install python-ipaddress:

pip install ipaddress

This module is compatible with Python 2 and provides a very similar API to that of the ipaddress module included in the Python Standard Library since Python 3.3. More details here. In Python 2 you will need to explicitly convert the IP address string to unicode: ipaddress.ip_address(u'127.0.0.1').

Answer 4

I think this would do it...

def validIP(address):
    parts = address.split(".")
    if len(parts) != 4:
        return False
    for item in parts:
        if not 0 <= int(item) <= 255:
            return False
    return True

Answer 5

I have to give a great deal of credit to Markus Jarderot for his post - the majority of my post is inspired from his.

I found that Markus' answer still fails some of the IPv6 examples in the Perl script referenced by his answer.

Here is my regex that passes all of the examples in that Perl script:

r"""^
     \s* # Leading whitespace
     # Zero-width lookaheads to reject too many quartets
     (?:
        # 6 quartets, ending IPv4 address; no wildcards
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){6}
             (?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)
        (?:\.(?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}
      |
        # 0-5 quartets, wildcard, ending IPv4 address
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,4}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
             (?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)
        (?:\.(?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}
      |
        # 0-4 quartets, wildcard, 0-1 quartets, ending IPv4 address
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,3}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:)))?
             (?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)
        (?:\.(?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}
      |
        # 0-3 quartets, wildcard, 0-2 quartets, ending IPv4 address
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,2}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,2}
             (?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)
        (?:\.(?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}
      |
        # 0-2 quartets, wildcard, 0-3 quartets, ending IPv4 address
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,1}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,3}
             (?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)
        (?:\.(?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}
      |
        # 0-1 quartets, wildcard, 0-4 quartets, ending IPv4 address
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}){0,1}
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,4}
             (?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)
        (?:\.(?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}
      |
        # wildcard, 0-5 quartets, ending IPv4 address
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,5}
             (?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)
        (?:\.(?:25[0-4]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}
      |
        # 8 quartets; no wildcards
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){7}[0-9a-f]{1,4}
      |
        # 0-7 quartets, wildcard
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,6}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
      |
        # 0-6 quartets, wildcard, 0-1 quartets
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,5}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
      |
        # 0-5 quartets, wildcard, 0-2 quartets
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,4}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,1}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
      |
        # 0-4 quartets, wildcard, 0-3 quartets
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,3}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,2}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
      |
        # 0-3 quartets, wildcard, 0-4 quartets
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,2}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,3}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
      |
        # 0-2 quartets, wildcard, 0-5 quartets
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,1}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,4}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
      |
        # 0-1 quartets, wildcard, 0-6 quartets
        (?:[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,5}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
      |
        # wildcard, 0-7 quartets
        (?:::(?!:))
        (?:(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}(?::(?!:))){0,6}[0-9a-f]{1,4})?
     )
     (?:/(?:1(?:2[0-7]|[01]\d)|\d\d?))? # With an optional CIDR routing prefix (0-128)
     \s* # Trailing whitespace
    $"""

I also put together a Python script to test all of those IPv6 examples; it's here on Pastebin because it was too large to post here.

You can run the script with test result and example arguments in the form of "[result]=[example]", so like:

python script.py Fail=::1.2.3.4: pass=::127.0.0.1 false=::: True=::1

or you can simply run all of the tests by specifying no arguments, so like:

python script.py

Anyway, I hope this helps somebody else!