Converting IPv4 or IPv6 address to a long for comparisons

Question

In order to check if an IPv4 or IPv6 address is within a certain range, I've got code that takes an IPv4 address, turns that into a long, then does that same conversion on the upper/lower bound of the subnet, then checks to see if the long is between those values.

I'd like to be able to do the same thing for IPv6, but saw nothing in the Python 2.6 standard libraries to allow me to do this, so I wrote this up:

import socket, struct
from array import array

def ip_address_to_long(address):
    ip_as_long = None
    try:
        ip_as_long = socket.ntohl(struct.unpack('L',
                socket.inet_pton(socket.AF_INET, address))[0])
    except socket.error:
        # try IPv6
        try:
            addr = array('L', struct.unpack('!4L',
                    socket.inet_pton(socket.AF_INET6, address)))
            addr.reverse()
            ip_as_long = sum(addr[i] << (i * 32) for i in range(len(addr)))
        except socket.error as se:
            raise ValueError('Invalid address')
    except Exception as e:
        print str(e)

    return ip_as_long

My question is: Is there a simpler way to do this that I am missing? Is there a standard library call that can do this for me?

Answer 1

IPy allows you to do all sorts of transforms on both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.