6.2 Inet4Address and Inet6Address

     

Java 1.4 introduces two new classes, Inet4Address and Inet6Address , in order to distinguish IPv4 addresses from IPv6 addresses:

 public final class Inet4Address extends InetAddress public final class Inet6Address extends InetAddress 

(In Java 1.3 and earlier, all InetAddress objects represent IPv4 addresses.)

Most of the time, you really shouldn't be concerned with whether an address is an IPv4 or IPv6 address. In the application layer where Java programs reside, you simply don't need to know this (and even if you do need to know, it's quicker to check the size of the byte array returned by getAddress( ) than to use instanceof to test which subclass you have). Mostly these two classes are just implementation details you do not need to concern yourself with. Inet4Address overrides several of the methods in InetAddress but doesn't change their behavior in any public way. Inet6Address is similar, but it does add one new method not present in the superclass, isIPv4CompatibleAddress( ) :

 public boolean isIPv4CompatibleAddress( ) 

This method returns true if and only if the address is essentially an IPv4 address stuffed into an IPv6 containerwhich means only the last four bytes are non-zero . That is, the address has the form 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:xxxx . If this is the case, you can pull off the last four bytes from the array returned by getBytes( ) and use this data to create an Inet4Address instead. However, you rarely need to do this.



Java Network Programming
Java Network Programming, Third Edition
ISBN: 0596007213
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 164

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