You can’t hide the complexity of doing that right but OTOH the ipaddress objects have useful str() methods: >>> str(ipaddress.ip_address('127.0.0.1')) '127

You can’t hide the complexity of doing that right but OTOH the ipaddress objects have useful str() methods: >>> str(ipaddress.ip_address('127.0.0.1')) '127.0.0.1' >>> str(ipaddress.ip_address('::1')) '::1' >>> str(ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24')) '192.168.42.0/24' But you can do stuff like: >>> ipaddress.ip_address('192.168.42.23') in ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24') True >>> ipaddress.ip_address('192.168.41.23') in ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24') False or for addr in ipaddress.ip_network('192.168.42.0/24'): print(adds) Etc. I strongly suggest to have a look at http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/ipaddress.html#ipaddress-howto http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/ipaddress.html#ipaddress-ho... to have an overview over it’s functionality – unfortunately the API docs aren’t done yet, but will be for 3.3 final. edit fixed code markup