IPv6 parsing in C

Question

I wanted to know how I can parse an IPv6 address in C and convert it to a 128 bit value?

So a hex address like 1:22:333:aaaa:b:c:d:e needs to be convert

Answer 1

You can use getaddrinfo() POSIX function. It is more flexible than inet_pton(), for example it automatically detects IPv4 and IPv6 address formats, it can resolve even hostnames (using DNS resolving) and port/service names (using /etc/services).

#include 
#include 
#include 

....

const char *ip6str = "::2";

struct sockaddr_storage result;
socklen_t result_len;

struct addrinfo *res = NULL;
struct addrinfo hints;
memset(&hints, 0, sizeof(struct addrinfo));
hints.ai_family = PF_UNSPEC;
hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM;
hints.ai_flags = AI_DEFAULT | AI_NUMERICHOST | AI_NUMERICSERV;

rc = getaddrinfo(ip6str, NULL, &hints, &res);
if (rc != 0)
{
    fprintf(stderr, "Failure to parse host '%s': %s (%d)", ip6str, gai_strerror(rc), rc);
    return -1;
}

if (res == NULL)
{
    // Failure to resolve 'ip6str'
    fprintf(stderr, "No host found for '%s'", ip6str);
    return -1;
}

// We use the first returned entry
result_len = res->ai_addrlen;
memcpy(&result, res->ai_addr, res->ai_addrlen);

freeaddrinfo(res);

The IPv6 address is stored in the struct sockaddr_storage result variable.

if (result.ss_family == AF_INET6) // Ensure that we deal with IPv6
{
    struct sockaddr_in6 * sa6 = (struct sockaddr_in6 *) &result;
    struct in6_addr * in6 = &sa6->sin6_addr;
    in6->s6_addr[0]; // This is a first byte of the IPv6
    in6->s6_addr[15]; // This is a last byte of the IPv6
}