666726 - request for portable interface for inet_ntop and inet_pton

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(NSPR :: NSPR, defect)

Description

[Sriram Natarajan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.100 Safari/534.30
Build Identifier: NSPR 4.8.3

Our product currently uses NSPR extensively and we are looking for a portable API to convert packed address into dot-notation format (some thing along the lines of inet_ntop and inet_pton)

I did take a look at PR_NetAddrToString and this is NOT what I am looking for. This is because inet_ntop allows reading from a input string (which can be greater than 16 bytes) and converts into a 16-byte human readable IPv6 address.

APR has a similar interface like apr_inet_ntop. I am looking for some thing similar within NSPR. 

This will be especially useful since  inet_ntop is not available on older versions of Windows 

Having this API within NSPR will allow programmers to invoke this API without having to worry that inet_ntop is not available on Windows 2003 server etc. 

thanks

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Need API equivalent of apr_inet_ntop or inet_ntop
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
this API does not exist.

Expected Results:  
PR_InetNtoP

Comment 1

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Thank you for the suggestion.  I don't understand this comment of yours:

    ... inet_ntop allows reading from a input string (which can be greater than 16 bytes)
    and converts into a 16-byte human readable IPv6 address.

For this discussion let's use the inet_ntop man page at
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/inet_ntop.html

The src input argument to inet_ntop is an IP address, not a string, and if the af
argument is AF_INET6, src should point to a 16-byte IPv6 address.

Did I misunderstand something?  Thanks.

Comment 2

[Sriram Natarajan]

Thanks. You are right. I was assuming inet_ntop or apr_inet_ntop can convert a packed decimal string to its corresponding IPv6 address. I apologize for wasting your time.

Comment 3

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Sriram: no problem.  So you're talking about a "packed decimal" string.  Is this what you mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal#Packed_BCD
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/books/c0925083170.htm

I am not familiar with the packed decimal format.  It is uncommon to represent an IP address
in packed decimal format, which is why there is no NSPR function for converting an IP address
in packed decimal format to a string.