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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

While I don't share the OP's worry, I'm guessing he was thinking of utility functions operating on strings as the alternative.

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You can’t hide the complexity of doing that right but OTOH the ipaddress objects have useful str() methods:

  >>> str(ipaddress.ip_address('127.0.0.1'))
  '127.0.0.1'
  >>> str(ipaddress.ip_address('::1'))
  '::1'
  >>> str(ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24'))
  '192.168.42.0/24'

But you can do stuff like:

  >>> ipaddress.ip_address('192.168.42.23') in ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24')
  True
  >>> ipaddress.ip_address('192.168.41.23') in ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24')
  False

  for addr in ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24'):
      print(adds)

Etc. I strongly suggest to have a look at http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/ipaddress.html#ipaddress-ho... to have an overview over it’s functionality – unfortunately the API docs aren’t done yet, but will be for 3.3 final.

edit fixed code markup

Just for the record, I agree that the problem space is such that a utility class is warranted having written code dealing with IP addresses in the past; I was just speculating about the OP's thoughts :).

yes, just one or two utility functions would do. IMHO there is no need to initialize a class and call a method just for checking network overlap/boundaries.

It's not a high overhead. Your string method would have to do basically the same thing as the ipaddress initialization and method call. As a benefit, with ipaddress you don't have to re-parse the string every time you want to manipulate it as an address; and you get a bit of typechecking and documentation from using a specialized class.

no need to use it, really. you can pretend it doesn't exist. problem solved.

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