check if a string matches an IP address pattern in python?

python

update: The original answer bellow is good for 2011, but since 2012, one is likely better using Python's ipaddress stdlib module - besides checking IP validity for IPv4 and IPv6, it can do a lot of other things as well.</update>

It looks like you are trying to validate IP addresses. A regular expression is probably not the best tool for this.

If you want to accept all valid IP addresses (including some addresses that you probably didn't even know were valid) then you can use IPy (Source):

from IPy import IP
IP('127.0.0.1')

If the IP address is invalid it will throw an exception.

Or you could use socket (Source):

import socket
try:
    socket.inet_aton(addr)
    # legal
except socket.error:
    # Not legal

If you really want to only match IPv4 with 4 decimal parts then you can split on dot and test that each part is an integer between 0 and 255.

def validate_ip(s):
    a = s.split('.')
    if len(a) != 4:
        return False
    for x in a:
        if not x.isdigit():
            return False
        i = int(x)
        if i < 0 or i > 255:
            return False
    return True

Note that your regular expression doesn't do this extra check. It would accept 999.999.999.999 as a valid address.

If you use Python3, you can use ipaddress module http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/ipaddress.html. Example:

>>> import ipaddress

>>> ipv6 = "2001:0db8:0a0b:12f0:0000:0000:0000:0001"
>>> ipv4 = "192.168.2.10"
>>> ipv4invalid = "266.255.9.10"
>>> str = "Tay Tay"

>>> ipaddress.ip_address(ipv6)
IPv6Address('2001:db8:a0b:12f0::1')

>>> ipaddress.ip_address(ipv4)
IPv4Address('192.168.2.10')

>>> ipaddress.ip_address(ipv4invalid)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/ipaddress.py", line 54, in ip_address
    address)
ValueError: '266.255.9.10' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address

>>> ipaddress.ip_address(str)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/ipaddress.py", line 54, in ip_address
    address)
ValueError: 'Tay Tay' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address

I'm normally the one of the very few Python experts who steadfastly defends regular expressions (they have quite a bad reputation in the Python community), but this is not one of those cases -- accepting (say) '333.444.555.666' as an "IP address" is really bad, and if you need to do more checks after matching the RE, much of the point of using a RE is lost anyway. So, I second @Mark's recommendations heartily: IPy for generality and elegance (including support of IPv6 if you want!), string operations and int checks if you only need IPv4 (but, think twice about that limitation, and then think one more -- IPv6's time has way come!-):

def isgoodipv4(s):
    pieces = s.split('.')
    if len(pieces) != 4: return False
    try: return all(0<=int(p)<256 for p in pieces)
    except ValueError: return False

I'd far rather do that than a convoluted RE to match only numbers between 0 and 255!-)

On Python 3.6 I think is much simpler as ipaddress module is already included:

import ipaddress

    def is_ipv4(string):
        try:
            ipaddress.IPv4Network(string)
            return True
        except ValueError:
            return False

One more validation without re:

def validip(ip):
    return ip.count('.') == 3 and  all(0<=int(num)<256 for num in ip.rstrip().split('.'))

for i in ('123.233.42.12','3234.23.453.353','-2.23.24.234','1.2.3.4'):
    print i,validip(i)

check if a string matches an IP address pattern in python?

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