Validate IP Addresses in PHP

Let’s say you were given a task to validate an IP address in a custom script. One approach is to use regular expressions and use pattern matching to see if user input is correct or not. In this example, we will use a regular expression below to validate IP addresses.

We assume user input is done via a form. First things first, we need to sanitize the input. Once sanitized, we can then test the input against the regular expression using a PHP function called the ereg().

// the regular expression for valid ip addresses
// sanitize input from form
$ip_address = addslashes(htmlspecialchars(strip_tags(trim($_POST['ip_address']))));
// test input against the regular expression
if (ereg($reg_ex, $ip_address)) { 
   // ip address is valid
} else {
   // ip address is not valid

The result is, we now have a facility to check the validity of IP addresses. We can now perform additional steps when the IP address is valid, or display errors if the IP address is invalid.