I'm trying to compile beej's guide to network programming examples, but Windows XP doesn't have such a function. I'm using mingw, if it makes any difference.
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inet_ntop is also missing in Winsock implementation on Windows Phone 8.1. How MS could hope for a success of such a crippled platform? – Ales Teska Aug 07 '17 at 20:53
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Yep, and also missing for Windows CE 7. – bk138 Apr 09 '21 at 18:47
5 Answers
From the WinSock layer:
WSAAddressToString
(ntop)WSAStringToAddress
(pton)
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1Note that `WSAAddressToString` will append the port number as well if your address structure has one. So to just get the IP, you may have to create a new address with no port. – jowo Jan 13 '12 at 08:40
If you're only dealing with IPv4 addresses, you can use inet_ntoa
. It's available on Windows 2000 or later. Otherwise you'll have to either require Vista and later, or write your own inet_ntop function.
You could also look at boost - the boost::asio has an inet_ntop
implementation that works in Windows: boost::asio::detail::socket_ops::inet_ntop
. You can see the source code here.

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4inet_ntoa is available on every version of windows with WinSock2 on it, you can't trust MSDN when it comes to minimum version, they seem to have forgotten about Win9x and NT4 – Anders Oct 15 '09 at 14:42
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MinGW headers don't contain a declaration of inet_ntop. So even on Windows Vista and later you can't use it :( – Youda008 Dec 04 '16 at 11:33
There is also inet_ntop
function in POSIX compliant libc for Windows (PlibC) library that was created for porting POSIX applications to Windows. There is no notes about it in online documentation, but it exists in file inet_ntop.c
at least since 2008 (according to file date).
const char * inet_ntop(int af, const void *src, char *dst, size_t size)

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You might want to use something Jeroen Massar provided here, excerpt from his post follows:
const char *inet_ntop(int af, const void *src, char *dst, socklen_t cnt)
{
if (af == AF_INET)
{
struct sockaddr_in in;
memset(&in, 0, sizeof(in));
in.sin_family = AF_INET;
memcpy(&in.sin_addr, src, sizeof(struct in_addr));
getnameinfo((struct sockaddr *)&in, sizeof(struct
sockaddr_in), dst, cnt, NULL, 0, NI_NUMERICHOST);
return dst;
}
else if (af == AF_INET6)
{
struct sockaddr_in6 in;
memset(&in, 0, sizeof(in));
in.sin6_family = AF_INET6;
memcpy(&in.sin6_addr, src, sizeof(struct in_addr6));
getnameinfo((struct sockaddr *)&in, sizeof(struct
sockaddr_in6), dst, cnt, NULL, 0, NI_NUMERICHOST);
return dst;
}
return NULL;
}

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It works, you are really a lifesaver, thanks. after trying ways to fix the compiling error of inet_ntop in vs2008, this one is the perfect answer. – terwxqian Feb 17 '22 at 09:56
you can use winsocket with mingw-64 on windows 7
#include <winsock2.h>
#include <windows.h>
#include <ws2tcpip.h>
linkwith
gcc showip.c -lws2_32
Target: x86_64-w64-mingw32 Thread model: win32 gcc version 6.3.0 (GCC)

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