socket.inet_aton()

socket.inet_aton(ip_string)

Convert an IPv4 address from dotted-quad string format (for example, ‘123.45.67.89’) to 32-bit packed binary format, as a bytes object four characters in length. This is useful when conversing with a program that uses the standard C library and needs objects of type struct in_addr, which is the C type for the 32-bit packed binary this function returns.

inet_aton() also accepts strings with less than three dots; see the Unix manual page inet(3) for details.

If the IPv4 address string passed to this function is invalid, OSError will be raised. Note that exactly what is valid depends on the underlying C implementation of inet_aton().

inet_aton() does not support IPv6, and inet_pton() should be used instead for IPv4/v6 dual stack support.