[arin-tech-discuss] zero-padded IP addresses in "startAddress" and "endAddress" values

[Aaron Hughes]

+1

Thanks Seth.

Cheers,
Aaron

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 01:17:40PM -0700, Seth Mattinen wrote:
> On 3/28/12 12:40 PM, David Huberman wrote:
> > Hello Dani,
> > 
> > ARIN's Registration RESTful web service has always expressed IP addresses
> > with zero padding. As you point out, however, the Whois RESTful web
> > service does not.  I think a fair explanation of these two behaviors is
> > that Whois is assumed to be read mostly by humans, and in contrast, the
> > output of the Registration RESTful web service is assumed to be
> > interpreted by machines.
> > 
> 
> I find that logic flawed; leading zeros can mean "octal" to machines. If
> indeed the output is assumed to be interpreted be machines as octal then
> leading zeros would be appropriate, whereas a human would normally read
> a zero-padded number as base 10. If you're going to zero-pad then for
> consistency you should return "075.0126.000.000" rather than an
> ambiguous mix of potentially octal and potentially base 10. Or simply
> don't zero pad without a technical basis.
> 
> For example, if I were to take that output and feed it into "ping" on
> any of my Linux servers they do indeed interpret 075 as octal and try to
> ping "61.126.0.0".
> 
> ~Seth
> 
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Aaron Hughes 
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