Regular expression to match DNS hostname or IP Address?

Question

Does anyone have a regular expression handy that will match any legal DNS hostname or IP address?

It\'s easy to write one that works 95% of the time, but I\'m hoping

Answer 1

Checking for host names like... mywebsite.co.in, thangaraj.name, 18thangaraj.in, thangaraj106.in etc.,

[a-z\d+].*?\\.\w{2,4}$

Answer 2

It's worth noting that there are libraries for most languages that do this for you, often built into the standard library. And those libraries are likely to get updated a lot more often than code that you copied off a Stack Overflow answer four years ago and forgot about. And of course they'll also generally parse the address into some usable form, rather than just giving you a match with a bunch of groups.

For example, detecting and parsing IPv4 in (POSIX) C:

#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  for (int i=1; i!=argc; ++i) {
    struct in_addr addr = {0};
    printf("%s: ", argv[i]);
    if (inet_pton(AF_INET, argv[i], &addr) != 1)
      printf("invalid\n");
    else
      printf("%u\n", addr.s_addr);
  }
  return 0;
}

---

Obviously, such functions won't work if you're trying to, e.g., find all valid addresses in a chat message—but even there, it may be easier to use a simple but overzealous regex to find potential matches, and then use the library to parse them.

For example, in Python:

>>> import ipaddress
>>> import re
>>> msg = "My address is 192.168.0.42; 192.168.0.420 is not an address"
>>> for maybeip in re.findall(r'\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}', msg):
...     try:
...         print(ipaddress.ip_address(maybeip))
...     except ValueError:
...         pass

Answer 3

You can use the following regular expressions separately or by combining them in a joint OR expression.

ValidIpAddressRegex = "^(([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\.){3}([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])$";

ValidHostnameRegex = "^(([a-zA-Z0-9]|[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]*[a-zA-Z0-9])\.)*([A-Za-z0-9]|[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9\-]*[A-Za-z0-9])$";

ValidIpAddressRegex matches valid IP addresses and ValidHostnameRegex valid host names. Depending on the language you use \ could have to be escaped with \.

---

ValidHostnameRegex is valid as per RFC 1123. Originally, RFC 952 specified that hostname segments could not start with a digit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname

The original specification of hostnames in RFC 952, mandated that labels could not start with a digit or with a hyphen, and must not end with a hyphen. However, a subsequent specification (RFC 1123) permitted hostname labels to start with digits.

Valid952HostnameRegex = "^(([a-zA-Z]|[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9\-]*[a-zA-Z0-9])\.)*([A-Za-z]|[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9\-]*[A-Za-z0-9])$";

Answer 4

def isValidHostname(hostname):

    if len(hostname) > 255:
        return False
    if hostname[-1:] == ".":
        hostname = hostname[:-1]   # strip exactly one dot from the right,
                                   #  if present
    allowed = re.compile("(?!-)[A-Z\d-]{1,63}(?<!-)$", re.IGNORECASE)
    return all(allowed.match(x) for x in hostname.split("."))

Answer 5

I found this works pretty well for IP addresses. It validates like the top answer but it also makes sure the ip is isolated so no text or more numbers/decimals are after or before the ip.

(?<!\S)(?:(?:\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\b|.\b){7}(?!\S)

Answer 6

The new Network framework has failable initializers for struct IPv4Address and struct IPv6Address which handle the IP address portion very easily. Doing this in IPv6 with a regex is tough with all the shortening rules.

Unfortunately I don't have an elegant answer for hostname.

Note that Network framework is recent, so it may force you to compile for recent OS versions.

import Network
let tests = ["192.168.4.4","fkjhwojfw","192.168.4.4.4","2620:3","2620::33"]

for test in tests {
    if let _ = IPv4Address(test) {
        debugPrint("\(test) is valid ipv4 address")
    } else if let _ = IPv6Address(test) {
        debugPrint("\(test) is valid ipv6 address")
    } else {
        debugPrint("\(test) is not a valid IP address")
    }
}

output:
"192.168.4.4 is valid ipv4 address"
"fkjhwojfw is not a valid IP address"
"192.168.4.4.4 is not a valid IP address"
"2620:3 is not a valid IP address"
"2620::33 is valid ipv6 address"