Network Automation - Validation of IPV4 Address

In this post, I am going to teach you on how to validate the IPV4 address which is from “Practical Network Automation book”. There are two ways

1. Building own logic
2. Using the Library

Building own Logic:

First, let us see the validation of the IPV4 address using own logic. Generally, we know that IPV4 has four octets separated by dots. That means the IPV4 address has 3 dots and four octets separated by these dots and they are in the range of 0-255. So, we have to validate these two conditions in order to validate IPV4 address. Below is the script for this functionality.

def ip_validate(ip_address):

    #Check for the presence of four octets

    if(ip_addr.count(".") != 3):

        return False

    octets = ip_addr.split(".")

    #Check the range of each octet in the given input

    for each_octet in octets:

        try:

            if(int(each_octet) < 0 or int(each_octet) > 255):

                return False

        except:

            return False

    return True

#Take IP Address and pass it to function to validate

ip_addr = input("Enter an IP Address: ").strip() #Eliminate Extra spaces

ip_addr_flag = ip_validate(ip_addr)

#Based on the valiadation result from Validation function, Print message

if(ip_addr_flag):

    print("Correct IP Address")

else:

    print("IncorrectIP Address")

 Using the Socket Library:

There is an inbuilt socket library that can be used to validate the IPV4 address. If the IPV4 address is valid, it can be converted successfully using the inet_aton function of the socket library. Otherwise, it throws an exception stating that the IPV4 address is not valid. Below is the script for this functionality.

import socket

#Take IP Address and pass it to function to validate

ip_addr = input("Enter an IP Address: ").strip() #Eliminate Extra spaces

try:

    #Convert Dotted decimal representation to Binary format

    ip_addr_con = socket.inet_aton(ip_addr)

    print("IP Address is Valid")

except socket.error:

    print("Invalid IP Address")