Convert IP address string to binary in Python

Question

As part of a larger application, I am trying to convert an IP address to binary. Purpose being to later calculate the broadcast address for Wake on LAN traffic. I am assuming that there is a much more efficient way to do this then the way I am thinking. Which is breaking up the IP address by octet, adding 0's to the beginning of each octet where necessary, converting each octet to binary, then combining the results. Should I be looking at netaddr, sockets, or something completely different?

Example: From 192.168.1.1 to 11000000.10101000.00000001.00000001

Answer 1

Is socket.inet_aton() what you want?

Answer 2

ipaddr (see PEP 3144):

import ipaddr

print ipaddr.IPNetwork('192.168.1.1/24').broadcast
# -> 192.168.1.255

Answer 3

You think of something like below ?

ip = '192.168.1.1'
print '.'.join([bin(int(x)+256)[3:] for x in ip.split('.')])

I agree with others, you probably should avoid to convert to binary representation to achieve what you want.