utf8toipv4

UTF-8 strings as ip addresses and vice versa

this crate has both a library and two binary packages. The library package exposes a few basic functions which can be used to convert UTF-8 strings into ipv4 addresses. This is done by first converting each character/grapheme in the string into its associated Unicode code point as a base 10 u64 and storing the non-zero bytes in an array. The first four non-zero bytes from that array are then converted to an ipv4 address. This functionality is accessible from the binary crate ’utf8toipv4’.

If you want to figure out what input to utf8toipv4 would result in a given ip address, you can use the ’ipv4toutf8’ binary crate.

The question of which UTF-8 strings will yield a given ip address when fed into utf8toipv4 is more difficult to answer, as there are thousands of potential solutions given the way UTF-8 and utf8toipv4 both work. As such, ipv4toutf8 prints out a list of a few UTF-8 strings that will work. Many of these are hideous and feature a lot of unprintable characters, but that’s just the nature of these things.

utf8toipv4 (library)

the library exposes the following functions:

utf8_to_ipv4(&str) -> Result<Vec<String>,Error>,

ipv4_to_utf8(&str) -> Vec<String>,

utf8toipv4 (binary package)

the utf8toipv4 binary package simply calls the utf8_to_ipv4 function on whatever string is supplied as a command line argument. This can be piped into xargs and used as an argument to whatever networking tool you want.

utf8toipv4 Isaiah | xargs ping
PING 73.115.97.105 (73.115.97.105) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 73.115.97.105: icmp_seq=1 ttl=42 time=83.6 ms
64 bytes from 73.115.97.105: icmp_seq=2 ttl=42 time=82.1 ms
64 bytes from 73.115.97.105: icmp_seq=3 ttl=42 time=78.2 ms
64 bytes from 73.115.97.105: icmp_seq=4 ttl=42 time=80.8 ms
64 bytes from 73.115.97.105: icmp_seq=5 ttl=42 time=83.0 ms
64 bytes from 73.115.97.105: icmp_seq=6 ttl=42 time=82.0 ms
^C
--- 73.115.97.105 ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 received, 0% packet loss, time 5007ms

utf8toipv4 🍌😂 | xargs ping
PING 76.243.1.2 (76.243.1.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 76.243.1.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=172 ms
64 bytes from 76.243.1.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=66.5 ms
64 bytes from 76.243.1.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=65.8 ms
^C
--- 76.243.1.2 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms

ipv4toutf8 (binary package)

the ipv4toutf8 binary package simply calls the ipv4_to_utf8 function on whatever string is supplied as a command line argument. If the string is not a valid ipv4 address, it prints an error. If the string is a valid ipv4 address, it prints each of the computed solution strings on its own line like so:

ipv4toutf8 192.168.2.1
\u{c0}\u{a8}\u{2}\u{1}
\u{c0}𐊨
𪣀\u{1}
ꣀ\u{2}\u{1}
ꣀĂ
\u{c0}\u{a8}Ă

By default, most non-printable characters are represented as their ASCII escape codes. I might add an option to print the raw output in the future, but I don’t want to right now.