Integer to IP Address - C

Question

I\'m preparing for a quiz, and I have a strong suspicion I may be tasked with implementing such a function. Basically, given an IP address in network notation, how can we ge

Answer 1

This is what I would do if passed a string buffer to fill and I knew the buffer was big enough (ie at least 16 characters long):

sprintf(buffer, "%d.%d.%d.%d",
  (ip >> 24) & 0xFF,
  (ip >> 16) & 0xFF,
  (ip >>  8) & 0xFF,
  (ip      ) & 0xFF);

This would be slightly faster than creating a byte array first, and I think it is more readable. I would normally use snprintf, but IP addresses can't be more than 16 characters long including the terminating null.

Alternatively if I was asked for a function returning a char*:

char* IPAddressToString(int ip)
{
  char[] result = new char[16];

  sprintf(result, "%d.%d.%d.%d",
    (ip >> 24) & 0xFF,
    (ip >> 16) & 0xFF,
    (ip >>  8) & 0xFF,
    (ip      ) & 0xFF);

  return result;
}