# ip2long

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7)

ip2long — Converts a string containing an (IPv4) Internet Protocol dotted address into a long integer

### Description

ip2long ( string `$ip_address` ) : int

The function ip2long() generates a long integer representation of IPv4 Internet network address from its Internet standard format (dotted string) representation.

ip2long() will also work with non-complete IP addresses. Read » http://publibn.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/libs/commtrf2/inet_addr.htm for more info.

### Parameters

`ip_address`

  A standard format address.

### Return Values

Returns the long integer or `FALSE` if `ip_address` is invalid.

### Changelog

Version | Description
--- | ---
5.5.0 | Prior to this version, on Windows ip2long() would sometimes return a valid number even if passed a value which was not an (IPv4) Internet Protocol dotted address.
5.2.10 | Prior to this version, ip2long() would sometimes return a valid number even if passed a value which was not an (IPv4) Internet Protocol dotted address.

### Examples

Example #1 ip2long() Example

`<?php
$ip = gethostbyname('www.example.com');
$out = "The following URLs are equivalent:<br />\n";
$out .= 'http://www.example.com/, http://' . $ip . '/, and http://' . sprintf("%u", ip2long($ip)) . "/<br />\n";
echo $out;
?>`

Example #2 Displaying an IP address

This second example shows how to print a converted address with the printf() function:

`<?php
$ip = gethostbyname('www.example.com');
$long = ip2long($ip);
if ($long == -1 || $long === FALSE) {
echo 'Invalid IP, please try again';
} else {
echo $ip . "\n"; // 192.0.34.166
echo $long . "\n"; // 3221234342 (-1073732954 on 32-bit systems, due to integer overflow)
printf("%u\n", ip2long($ip)); // 3221234342
}
?>`

### Notes

> Note:

> Because PHP's integer type is signed, and many IP addresses will result in negative integers on 32-bit architectures, you need to use the "%u" formatter of sprintf() or printf() to get the string representation of the unsigned IP address.

> Note:

> ip2long() will return `FALSE` for the IP 255.255.255.255 in PHP 5 <= 5.0.2, and -1 on 64-bits systems in PHP 5 <=5.2.4. It was fixed in PHP 5.2.5 where it returns 4294967295. 32-bit systems will return -1 due to the integer value overflowing.

### See Also

- long2ip() - Converts an long integer address into a string in (IPv4) Internet standard dotted format
- sprintf() - Return a formatted string