Getting IPV4 address from a sockaddr structure

Question

How can I extract an IP address into a string? I can\'t find a reference that tells me how char sa_data[14] is encoded.

Answer 1

inet_ntoa() works for IPv4; inet_ntop() works for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Given an input struct sockaddr *res, here are two snippets of code (tested on macOS):

Using inet_ntoa()

#include 

struct sockaddr_in *addr_in = (struct sockaddr_in *)res;
char *s = inet_ntoa(addr_in->sin_addr);
printf("IP address: %s\n", s);

Using inet_ntop()

#include 
#include 

char *s = NULL;
switch(res->sa_family) {
    case AF_INET: {
        struct sockaddr_in *addr_in = (struct sockaddr_in *)res;
        s = malloc(INET_ADDRSTRLEN);
        inet_ntop(AF_INET, &(addr_in->sin_addr), s, INET_ADDRSTRLEN);
        break;
    }
    case AF_INET6: {
        struct sockaddr_in6 *addr_in6 = (struct sockaddr_in6 *)res;
        s = malloc(INET6_ADDRSTRLEN);
        inet_ntop(AF_INET6, &(addr_in6->sin6_addr), s, INET6_ADDRSTRLEN);
        break;
    }
    default:
        break;
}
printf("IP address: %s\n", s);
free(s);