PHP: Validate an IP Address

Andrew — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:14:47 +0000

So you need to check if some string is a valid IP address. You could simply test it against a regular expression:

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function is_valid_ipv4($ip)
{
return preg_match('/\b(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.'.
'(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.'.
'(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.'.
'(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\b/', $ip) !== 0;
}

Regular Expression obtained here

This will actually work for most situations, but it's lacking in a few ways. Suppose you want to exclude private or reserved IP addresses. Maybe you want to validate IPv6 addresses too; not just IPv4.

Enter PHP's Data Filtering Extension. It just works, and you don't have to worry about maintaining (or properly applying) complex regular expressions.

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function is_valid_ip($ip, $include_priv_res = true)
{
return $include_priv_res ?
filter_var($ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP) !== false :
filter_var($ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_NO_PRIV_RANGE | FILTER_FLAG_NO_RES_RANGE) !== false;
}

Now to test it.

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$ips = array('72.215.140.69',
'192.168.0.1',
'127.0.0.1',
'10.0.0.1',
'255.255.255.0',
'andrewensley.com',
'255.255.256.0',
'::1',
'fe00::0',
'2001:4860:0:1001::68');

foreach($ips as $ip)
{
echo $ip,' ', is_valid_ip($ip, false) ? 'yes' : 'no','
';
}

The above will output:

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72.215.140.69 yes
192.168.0.1 no
127.0.0.1 yes
10.0.0.1 no
255.255.255.0 no
andrewensley.com no
255.255.256.0 no
::1 yes
fe00::0 yes
2001:4860:0:1001::68 yes

Thank you PHP for making this otherwise complex task very simple. And even better: it's fast!

I tested the regular expression and the filter_var functions by running each 100,000 times. Here are the timings for each test:

1.53423094749 seconds with the filter_var function
3.1516289711 seconds with the regular expression function

Not bad! Happy filtering.

Possibly Related posts:

AndrewEnsley.com » Validation

PHP: Validate an IP Address