Talk:Parse an IP Address: Difference between revisions

== Sloppy ==

This task currently seems sloppy.

First, it requires that extra data (the port) be ignored. In practical use, if the port is being passed to a routine that parses ip addresses, this probably means the data is being mishandled. So good practice suggests that this be treated as an error case. This is a minor but annoying complexity in the task.

Second, it asks us to mix ipv4 and ipv6 addresses but ipv4 addresses have a representation as ipv6 addresses (see rfc 2373, for example) but the example implementation mixes them in the same data structure without labeling the type and without using a consistent mapping.

I can think of several ways to go here:

# Discard the port parsing requirement

# Ask for ip,port to be reported as a pair

# Ask for ipv4 and ipv6 address results to be distinguished (or put them in separate tasks)

# Ask for the ipv4 addresses to be encoded as ipv6 addresses (127.0.0.1 becomes ::127.0.0.1 to distinguish it from ::7f00:1).

# change the task to make some of these issues moot

But I am not sure which way to go here. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 13:58, 28 September 2011 (UTC)