Storing an IP as an unsigned int?

Question

I read that the best way to store IP addresses in a database is to make an Unsigned Int(10) field. How do I convert the IP addresses using PHP? I've tried using

$this->ip = long2ip($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

But this doesn't seem to work. I found the way to convert it back to an IP address using

$this->ip = sprintf("%u", ip2long($result['ip']));

How do I convert the IP Address initially? Should I be using PHP for this? Or would it be better to integrate into the MySQL query?

Answer 1

long2ip converts an integer into the IP format and ip2long does the inverse.

So use ip2long to convert $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] into an integer for storing it in the database and use long2ip after reading the integer from the database:

$long = ip2long($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
$ip   = long2ip($long);

Answer 2

I used this

function ip2int($ip) {
    $a = explode(".",$ip);
    return $a[0] * 256 * 256 * 256 + $a[1] * 256 * 256 + $a[2] * 256 + $a[3];
}

Answer 3

You’ll want to convert the dotted string version of your IP using ip2long, and back using long2ip. Looks like you have it backwards right now.

$integer_ip = ip2long($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]); // => 1113982819
$dotted_ip  = long2ip($integer_ip);             // => "66.102.7.99"

Answer 4

If you're using MySQL you can use the INET_ATON (ip2long equivalent) and INET_NTOA (long2ip) functions rather than doing the processing with PHP:

Answer 5

Better put this logic in your SQL query:

INSERT INTO `table`
    (`ip`)
VALUES
    INET_ATON('192.168.0.1')

And then covert address back when selecting data:

SELECT INET_NTOA(`ip`)
    FROM `table`