From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-05-31T05:18:03+09:00
Subject: Re: inet_addr inet_ntoa

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 03:17:57AM +0900, Rick Fiorentino wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I tried looking up answers for this with little success...any help is
> appreciated, bear with my newness to Ruby.
> 
> The application I am working on can store ip addresses in a DB. They are
> accessed by different platforms so the plan is to store IPs in network
> order and display as host order.
> 
> I cannot find the following routines in ruby land to aid with the
> process:
> 
> inet_addr - to store the IP as network ordered
> inet_ntoa - to retrieve the IP as host ordered
> 
> How do people deal with these conversions? I assume dealing with Endian
> issues affects several of you folks?
> 
> Any help is greatly appreciated...sorry if this has been covered before.

Look at:

  ri Array#pack
  ri String#unpack

In particular, conversion "N" will pack as four bytes in network order
(big-endian)