CODEWITHSUNDEEP
network-programmingroutesipv6htonl
GPK
GPK

Reputation: 11

How to convert Network Byte order to Host Byte order and vice versa for IPv6 addresses in C?

Can anyone explain the concept of network byte order and host byte order for ipv6 addresses .

Upvotes: 0

Views: 620

Answers (1)

Michael Hampton
Michael Hampton

Reputation: 10000

In IPv6, there's effectively no difference.

The following assumes C on Linux and Windows:

In IPv4, an address is stored as an unsigned 32-bit integer, so it is affected by the endianness of the system. It must therefore be converted to network byte order before it can be sent on the wire.

But an IPv6 address is stored in a sockaddr_in6 struct, in a field in6_addr which is also a struct containing an array of 16 unsigned 8-bit characters.

Therefore, because the IPv6 address is always effectively in network byte order, it is not necessary to do any byte order conversion when working with IPv6 addresses, e.g. those returned from getaddrinfo(). You may simply treat the in6_addr struct as opaque data.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions