Create ipaddr-py IPv6Address from byte string

Question

I frequently need to convert a raw, byte-encoded IPv6 address into an IPv6Address object from the ipaddr-py project. Byte-encoded IPv6 addresses are not accepted by the initializer as shown here:

>>> import ipaddr   
>>> byte_ip = b'\x20\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x01'
>>> ipaddr.IPAddress(byte_ip)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "ipaddr.py", line 78, in IPAddress
    address)
ValueError: ' \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x01' does
 not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address

What is the easiest way to convert the byte-encoding to a format ipaddr-py can understand? I'm using v. 2.1.10 of ipaddr.py.

My only workaround so far is way too long for the simple task:

>>> def bytes_to_ipaddr_string(c):
...     c = c.encode('hex')
...     if len(c) is not 32: raise Exception('invalid IPv6 address')
...     s = ''
...     while c is not '':
...         s = s + ':'
...         s = s + c[:4]
...         c = c[4:]
...     return s[1:]
...
>>> ipaddr.IPAddress(bytes_to_ipaddr_string(byte_ip))
IPv6Address('2000::1')

EDIT: I'm looking for a cross-platform solution. Unix-only won't do.

Anyone got a better solution?

Answer 1

On Unix IPv6 bin -> string conversion is simple - all you need is socket.inet_ntop:

>>> socket.inet_ntop(socket.AF_INET6, b'\x20\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x01')
'2000::1'