C# IPAddress to Integer

In C#, IPAddress is a class which helps in handling IP address-related operations. Sometimes, we need to convert IP addresses to integers. This can be accomplished in C# by using the following code snippet:

IPAddress ipAddress = IPAddress.Parse("192.168.0.1");
int ipAsInt = BitConverter.ToInt32(ipAddress.GetAddressBytes(), 0);

In the code above, we first create an instance of the IPAddress class by parsing a string representation of an IP address. Then, we get the address bytes of the IP address using the GetAddressBytes() method of the IPAddress class. Finally, we use the BitConverter.ToInt32() method to convert the address bytes into an integer.

Example

Let's see an example of how to use the above code snippet to convert an IP address to an integer.

string ipString = "192.168.0.1";
IPAddress ipAddress = IPAddress.Parse(ipString);
int ipAsInt = BitConverter.ToInt32(ipAddress.GetAddressBytes(), 0);
Console.WriteLine("IP address {0} as integer: {1}", ipString, ipAsInt);

Output:

IP address 192.168.0.1 as integer: 16820416

Explanation

In the example above, we first define a string variable ipString which contains the IP address in the form of a string. Then, we create an instance of the IPAddress class using the Parse() method and passing in the ipString variable. Next, we use the GetAddressBytes() method to get the address bytes of the IP address and pass them to the BitConverter.ToInt32() method to convert them to an integer. Finally, we print the string representation of the IP address and the integer value to the console using the Console.WriteLine() method.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to convert an IP address to an integer in C# using the IPAddress and BitConverter classes. By converting IP addresses to integers, we can more easily perform operations such as sorting and comparing IP addresses.