Regular expression to match hostname or IP Address?

Question

Does anyone have a regular expression handy that will match any legal DNS hostname or IP address?

It's easy to write one that works 95% of the time, but I'm hoping to get something that's well tested to exactly match the latest RFC specs for hostnames.

Answer 1

See the source code for the perl module Regexp::Common::net

Answer 2

You can use the following regular expressions separately or by combining them in a joint OR expression.

ValidIpAddressRegex = "^(([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\.){3}([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])$";

ValidHostnameRegex = "^(([a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]*[a-zA-Z0-9])\.)*([A-Za-z]|[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9\-]*[A-Za-z0-9])$";

ValidIpAddressRegex matches valid IP addresses and ValidHostnameRegex valid host names. Depending on the language you use \ could have to be escaped with \.

Answer 3

What language do you use? It's better to avoid using regex for this purpose if possible. As you said, it may not work 100% of the time, and will totally break when ipv6 comes along. Try use a networking library to validate the string.

Answer 4

That Regex for IP Address is a charm.But i couldn't get the hostname regex workign correctly. For ex,for this:

"mail.yahoo.co.in"

It captures mail.yahoo.co.i and then n;

Same,for other hostnames too. the last letters after period(.) gets cut in to slices.

Any ideas?

FYI,I remove "^" and "$" in the regex because the task is to capture from a string not just matching.

Thanks

Answer 5

Here is a regex that I used in Ant to obtain a proxy host IP or hostname out of ANT_OPTS. This was used to obtain the proxy IP so that I could run an Ant "isreachable" test before configuring a proxy for a forked JVM.

^.*-Dhttp\.proxyHost=(\w{1,}\.\w{1,}\.\w{1,}\.*\w{0,})\s.*$

Answer 6

I don't seem to be able to edit the top post, so I'll add my answer here.

For hostname - easy answer, on egrep example here -- http: //www.linuxinsight.com/how_to_grep_for_ip_addresses_using_the_gnu_egrep_utility.html

egrep '([[:digit:]]{1,3}\.){3}[[:digit:]]{1,3}'

Though the case doesn't account for values like 0 in the fist octet, and values greater than 254 (ip addres) or 255 (netmask). Maybe an additional if statement would help.

As for legal dns hostname, provided that you are checking for internet hostnames only (and not intranet), I wrote the following snipped, a mix of shell/php but it should be applicable as any regular expression.

first go to ietf website, download and parse a list of legal level 1 domain names:

tld=$(curl -s http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt |  sed 1d  | cut -f1 -d'-' | tr '\n' '|' | sed 's/\(.*\)./\1/')
echo "($tld)"

That should give you a nice piece of re code that checks for legality of top domain name, like .com .org or .ca

Then add first part of the expression according to guidelines found here -- http: //www.domainit.com/support/faq.mhtml?category=Domain_FAQ&question=9 (any alphanumeric combination and '-' symbol, dash should not be in the beginning or end of an octet.

(([a-z0-9]+|([a-z0-9]+[-]+[a-z0-9]+))[.])+

Then put it all together (PHP preg_match example):

$pattern = '/^(([a-z0-9]+|([a-z0-9]+[-]+[a-z0-9]+))[.])+(AC|AD|AE|AERO|AF|AG|AI|AL|AM|AN|AO|AQ|AR|ARPA|AS|ASIA|AT|AU|AW|AX|AZ|BA|BB|BD|BE|BF|BG|BH|BI|BIZ|BJ|BM|BN|BO|BR|BS|BT|BV|BW|BY|BZ|CA|CAT|CC|CD|CF|CG|CH|CI|CK|CL|CM|CN|CO|COM|COOP|CR|CU|CV|CX|CY|CZ|DE|DJ|DK|DM|DO|DZ|EC|EDU|EE|EG|ER|ES|ET|EU|FI|FJ|FK|FM|FO|FR|GA|GB|GD|GE|GF|GG|GH|GI|GL|GM|GN|GOV|GP|GQ|GR|GS|GT|GU|GW|GY|HK|HM|HN|HR|HT|HU|ID|IE|IL|IM|IN|INFO|INT|IO|IQ|IR|IS|IT|JE|JM|JO|JOBS|JP|KE|KG|KH|KI|KM|KN|KP|KR|KW|KY|KZ|LA|LB|LC|LI|LK|LR|LS|LT|LU|LV|LY|MA|MC|MD|ME|MG|MH|MIL|MK|ML|MM|MN|MO|MOBI|MP|MQ|MR|MS|MT|MU|MUSEUM|MV|MW|MX|MY|MZ|NA|NAME|NC|NE|NET|NF|NG|NI|NL|NO|NP|NR|NU|NZ|OM|ORG|PA|PE|PF|PG|PH|PK|PL|PM|PN|PR|PRO|PS|PT|PW|PY|QA|RE|RO|RS|RU|RW|SA|SB|SC|SD|SE|SG|SH|SI|SJ|SK|SL|SM|SN|SO|SR|ST|SU|SV|SY|SZ|TC|TD|TEL|TF|TG|TH|TJ|TK|TL|TM|TN|TO|TP|TR|TRAVEL|TT|TV|TW|TZ|UA|UG|UK|US|UY|UZ|VA|VC|VE|VG|VI|VN|VU|WF|WS|XN|XN|XN|XN|XN|XN|XN|XN|XN|XN|XN|YE|YT|YU|ZA|ZM|ZW)[.]?$/i';

    if (preg_match, $pattern, $matching_string){
    ... do stuff
    }

You may also want to add an if statement to check that string that you checking is shorter than 256 characters -- http://www.ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.2003/msg00964.html

Answer 7

The hostname regex of smink is great but it will accept domain such as 'www'. Furthermore, it's missing the maximum length of each label (63) and the maximum length of a Fully Qualified Domain Name (255).

I couldn't find how to validate the length of the entire FQDN but it can be verified by a different function (length < 255).

Here's what it should look like:

^(([a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])\.)+([a-zA-Z0-9]{2,5})$

Answer 8

The hostname regex of smink does not observe the limitation on the length of individual labels within a hostname. Each label within a valid hostname may be no more than 63 octets long.

ValidHostnameRegex="^([a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])\
(\.([a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9]))*$"

Note that the backslash at the end of the first line (above) is Unix shell syntax for splitting the long line. It's not a part of the regular expression itself.

Here's just the regular expression alone on a single line:

^([a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])(\.([a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9]))*$

You should also check separately that the total length of the hostname must not exceed 255 characters. For more information, please consult RFC-952 and RFC-1123.